Medium launches TK, a private note-taking app that blends journaling with social sharing

Medium has released its first product that exists beyond its core blogging platform. According to The Verge, the company is launching TK, an app that merges note-taking and journaling with a private social network — a move CEO Tony Stubblebine calls the company's most important launch since 2017.

That earlier date matters. In 2017, Medium — then led by CEO Ev Williams — dropped advertising and became a subscription business. As The Verge reports, Stubblebine believes the problems Williams identified back then have only worsened: AI companies are scraping content at scale, while search engines and chatbots send ever less traffic back to publishers. Because Medium still relies on Google for a large share of its visitors, the slide into what The Verge describes as the era of "Google Zero" is, in Stubblebine's view, an existential risk.

Going underground

Stubblebine told The Verge that as Google traffic evaporates, his plan is to shift writing into places search engines cannot index — private blogging. TK is the first concrete expression of that idea. The app itself is deliberately spare, resembling an extremely stripped-down take on established note apps, and it is built around daily journal-style entries and longer-form drafts.

Notes, AI and Libraries

Two layers surround the basic editor.

The first is AI. A language model can be pointed at your own archive to search your notes, help organize them, or critique a draft. The name doubles as a shortcut inside the app: type the letters TK — a long-standing placeholder among editors, chosen precisely because the pair almost never occurs naturally in English — and the model fills in the missing information. Stubblebine, who repeatedly invoked the idea of Unix pipes in his conversation with The Verge, wants models to handle the routine labor of creating and organizing notes.

The second is sharing. Notes can be circulated by link or email in roughly the way a document would be, with collaborators able to comment, react with emoji and co-write. The bigger feature is what TK calls Libraries: private, topic-centered collections that members of a group contribute to, with no public page anywhere. The Verge's David Pierce reports that early Libraries include groups sharing book projects, swapping recipes and posting poetry drafts, all visible only to fellow members — a cross between a blog and a group chat.

No metrics, by design

According to The Verge, TK measures no pageviews and offers no rewards for attracting traffic. Stubblebine's argument is that Medium has always asked writers to perform publicly, which he considers untenable in a post-search web; TK is built around community response instead of reach. He says features along these lines will arrive on the main Medium platform soon.

Availability and the business case

For now, TK is open only to existing Medium members, with apps for the web, Android and iOS, and a native desktop version said to be coming. Stubblebine also sketched possible revenue paths: charging for private or paywalled content, in the manner of the newsletter business, and more speculatively, packaging the best material from a Library — a recipe collection, for instance — and selling access to people or even AI agents. His broader claim, as reported by The Verge, is that the general-purpose web keeps losing quality, and that if AI is the future, it needs to be grounded in a layer of human intelligence that may be better kept away from search algorithms.

Why it matters

TK is one of the clearest attempts yet by an established publishing platform to build for a web without search traffic. If referrals keep shrinking and AI systems keep summarizing instead of linking, publishers need distribution models that do not depend on ranking, and Medium is wagering that private, community-scoped writing is one viable answer. The app also tests whether personal notes and journals, augmented by AI, can stand on their own as a product category — and whether that store of human writing can eventually be sold, including to the AI systems now draining the open web of attention.