Medium’s TK adds private topic libraries without measuring pageviews

“I don’t think we’ve actually had a launch of anything important since 2017,” Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine said. The company’s new TK app is now free on the web, Android and iOS. A native desktop app is coming soon.

Why did Medium move away from advertising?

The last major shift came when Ev Williams, then Medium’s CEO, moved the company away from chasing advertising toward subscriptions. In 2017, Williams wrote: “It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to.”

Medium began charging for access to most content. Stubblebine says the company left what he calls the attention economy, but the forces behind that shift have grown: AI companies absorb content with little regard for legality, while search engines and chatbots send less traffic to websites.

Medium still depends on Google for much of its traffic, which makes reduced referrals an existential risk. Stubblebine recalls warning Google that losing traffic would hurt the search company too, because Medium could switch its roadmap to private blogging and take publishing underground. TK gives that idea a working form: a network with no need for Google referrals.

How does TK change the writing workflow?

TK combines a barebones note-taking app with a private social network. Its stripped-down interface resembles a reduced Evernote, but Stubblebine’s focus is the surrounding workflow, not another publishing dashboard. The aim is to get people writing more, then sharing that work with friends and fans.

The notes themselves favor daily, journal-style entries and longer-form writing. Writers can point an AI model at their work to search their notes, organize material or ask for feedback. The model handles some of the grunt work of creating and managing notes, an approach Stubblebine describes through the idea of Unix pipes.

The shortcut explains its own name: typing TK summons the model to fill in missing information. Letters T and K rarely appear next to each other in ordinary text, so writers use them as placeholders that are easy to find later.

Sharing follows the document handoff, not a public feed. A writer can send a link or email a note; collaborators can write, comment and leave emoji reactions. No search engine is required. That changes the distribution model.

What does private blogging mean?

That phrase describes Libraries, topic-centered collections where people contribute writing to a group. Early examples include ongoing book projects, recipe swaps and poetry drafts. A library can involve a few writers or a few hundred; its posts have no public face, making it a blog read only by its contributors.

TK differs from Medium’s public platform in its incentives: it does not measure pageviews or reward authors for attracting traffic. Stubblebine calls Medium performative because publishing there requires a desire to expose yourself to the world. TK instead aims to provide feedback and encouragement, not the drive to be noticed. Here, visibility has no meter.

Features built around that model will extend to the broader Medium platform soon, according to Stubblebine. He sees private and paywalled content as a route to revenue through the newsletter business. He also speculates that Medium could package the strongest material from a library such as Recipe Box and charge people, or AI agents, for access.

How might TK pay for itself?

TK itself is free, so that business case remains open. The immediate test is whether its private communities can create a paid offering without the pageview economy Medium abandoned in 2017. The broader wager concerns AI. Stubblebine argues that the generic web is becoming less useful and that an AI-based future needs the human intelligence contained in these private layers.

That claim puts TK in the middle of a distribution dispute. Authors get a place to write and organize material away from public search, while AI platforms continue consuming their output. The design still depends on people choosing to share with one another, but it removes the traffic counter from the room.

If Medium brings TK’s no-pageview model to its main platform, the experiment will show whether private publishing can support a business beyond subscriptions and newsletters. TK’s native desktop app and the wider platform’s new features remain the next tests.