Don't Publish On Medium

i was 2 years ahead of him!

👇🏼

ABANDON MEDIUM: https://john.do/abandon-medium/

👆🏼

i have thousands of posts on that platform... that they are monetizing until the end of time... and i don't see a penny. they also have some really shitty seo. i mean, terrible.

the greatest marketing trick of the century was Medium convincing writers to publish on it

I'll play Devil's advocate here...

I've been cross-posting my articles from my Wordpress site there for almost 3 years now.

I get 30+ newsletter subscribers directly from Medium every day.

Over the past 9 months, I've averaged over $10,000/mo from the Medium Partner Program.

All Medium articles can be set so that the canonical link refers back to your externally hosted article, which means you still get the SEO benefit and traffic going to your own site.

I've made several very good friends through Medium, which have also turned into really valuable partners.

I know my experience isn't necessarily representative, but I think more people should consider using Medium as an easy adjunct to a self-hosted platform for blogging.

Happy to chat more about this if people have questions!

Medium paywall pushed a few great things way. For example, distribution is not available if the paywall is disabled.

Imagine a new blogger use Medium, they don't have any followers to "clap" for their content. Which not triggering the detector for great content and make it hard for them to gain followers

Besides, most of the popular content provides only a surface of the information, since that is what the crow needed. Posts with deeper knowledge are getting buried.

Its funny how well received Medium was upon launch. Critics praised it for its phenomenal UI.
https://teehanlax.com/story/medium/

Now its dogshit.

I couldn't agree more, Medium is dead, paywall everywhere lol
Substack would be really great if we can set up a custom domain tho

I'm building imprint.to to address all the points in this article!

How's exactly the way Substack works ? Can you create some free contents and then ask for others to be behind a payment ? Any other interesting (and valuable, for the readers) platforms out there ?

Totally agree. Medium isn't really good as a distribution channel anyway when you just begin creating content (personally or as a startup). You still have to do a lot of work to bring people there, but there is little you can do to engage and retain them aside from getting more people to share your content.

Just when I thought of starting it on Medium.

I should think again.

Well, if you are tired of medium, here's a little humble writing platform I'm building: https://midnight.pub.

I don't like Medium.
I don't like their comments system - very annoying to make so many clicks just to see a response.
I don't like their monetization system.
But I can't agree with "You Are Building Medium's Brand, Not Your Own" - it's simply not true. When you create an article, you mention your business and it's how you are building your own brand. If your article has been noticed you can get much from it for your brand.

I’m pretty new to all these.

Didn’t realize that medium was this bad. I only just started writing and found medium easy. I click editor and type. No need to fiddle with formatting and it seems professional.

It seems substack is the recommended alternative from the comments — the initial pop up to readers seems a tadbit spammy though.

Are there other options? I’ve tried Wordpress. It’s a lot of headache plus gets expensive fast. Then netlify but wasn’t happy with all the tweaking, css needed for the template I chose.

At this stage I’m not really looking to have any subscribers. I simply want to focus on the writing, do light sharing and pump out articles until I get to about 50. Then next focus on marketing more. And medium made that easy.

Are there any recommendations for free alternatives to medium. Free because my writing journey is a long term game so I’m hoping to keep monthly cost close to zero for the first year.

I advise my clients to be careful with using Medium instead of their own blog, but that said I have personally found Medium to be valuable for audience building. I've been pulling in $30-$100 a month from it which is nice considering I barely use it.

Substack is great for some uses but just like Medium I advise people to consider you won't get any SEO benefit and cannot use/benefit from your domain with it.

For now, We are using Medium just to cross-post and linking the articles back to Substack which is where we are building the audience.

I guess if you are sharing the free resources or content, then it doesn't hurt cross-posting on Medium.