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Matter Drops Paywall, Shifts Activities to Medium

It’s been just overMatter a year since subcompact publisher launched with the goal of publishing one article each month, and a lot has changed. They’ve added more subscribers, have been acquired by the collaborative writing site Medium, and as of today they have removed their paywall.

There’s a new blog post today over on Matter's blog with the news. In addition to integrating their presence with their parent company Medium, Matter is also replacing their paywall with a membership type of payment system. All of their articles will be free to read.

And not only will the articles be free, but also longer and more numerous:

The third big change is another big one: We’ll be producing more long-form. We’re stepping up from our previous story-a-month approach, and moving to more regular, hard-hitting long-form features. Will more output mean lower quality? We promise you that it absolutely will not. One of our core goals for the next year is to make MATTER’s pieces—which are already competing with some of the best out there—better and better.

They are also planning more changes over the next few months, but declined to share any details.

Matter stands as one of the best examples of the radical bottom up changes that have been affecting journalism over the past few years. It was initially funded by $140,000 raised on Kickstarter. in early 2012, and in the not quite 2 years since it has been acquired, expanded, and now it has pivoted.

Don’t look now, but this digital magazine is exhibiting the behavior of a tech startup.

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