Medium is one platform that has changed how people(now even the biggest publishers) blog and share their musing with the world. And in a bid to expand backend API support for publishers on the platform, Medium has today announced that it has acquired rich media embedding suite Embedly.
Medium has always allowed publishers to depict their story using words, images and any other media that better expresses their content. While Embedly has served as an add-on to the service for writers by making it easier to embed rich media and providing analytics on content, customized recommendations.
In the official Medium post(as expected), Embedly says,
Our shared mission is making media consumption and publishing hassle-free, so publishers of any size can focus on their editorial pieces.
So we’re excited to help supercharge that promise together, creating world-class in-house capabilities that will bring the very best in multimedia embedding technology to all writers and publishers on Medium.
It further adds that you shouldn’t be disheartened by the news of this acquisition because your favorite embedding platform isn’t going anywhere. The Embedly team is joining Medium but will continue to operate independently. All ten Embedly employees will be staying on board focus on improving its platform. However, four of these will be relocating to Medium’s San Francisco offices.
The next aim of the team at Medium will be to make the platform an even more inviting place for creators. To make it possible, Embedly team will now work on embedding media faster, lighter and more robust across different platforms. In short, Embedly and Medium together believe that embedding and publishing the content your heart desires should be simple and hassle-free. And they will work together to make it happen.
Commenting on the acquisition, Sean Creeley, Founder, Embedly, says,
At Embedly, we started off trying to standardize embedding across providers and in our next act with Medium, we hope to lead the discussion on creating better standards and tools for everyone.
Launched in 2010 by Creeley and Art Gibson, Embedly wanted to be a platform that would delight people through rich media embeds — and it did just that. The company currently boast to be servicing over 500 million API requests per month and counts top publishers including Medium(obviously!), The New York Times, NPR and The Atlantic as its clients.
It’s statistical data also claims that 25 per cent of its users will engage with one of its embeds, and 100 million minutes are spent watching videos through its embeds on other platforms. Prior its acquisition, Embedly had raised $700k in three rounds of funding from the likes of Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Venture51, Betaworks and others.
