# Medium Is Building a Monetized Alternative to Twitter  ## Metadata - Author: [[Thomas Smith]] - Full Title: Medium Is Building a Monetized Alternative to Twitter - Category: #articles - URL: https://medium.com/p/bda70900de68 ## Highlights - Shortform posts are Medium articles which are 150 words or less. Because the average English word is 4.9 characters long, that means that a shortform article is likely around 735 characters. Tweets are currently limited to 280 characters, so that means that shortform Medium articles can be about 2.5x longer than your longest Tweet. Shortform articles are generally a 1–2 minute read.