Medium wants your stories, not your creativity

It just because of a video I watched about a week ago.

More interestingly, knowing that I need to post this video on this story, I found a way to show you what I mean of how “Medium likes Google”.

So let me say first, it’s because of this constant fight and battle that Medium doesn’t support it’s writers for various reasons, one including discovery. It’s a big thing that some writers are talking about. Anyways, someone sent me a private note saying that I should be using Google to search Medium for stories.

I checked into it. It works really well. It worked so well actually that I started searching for titles of my own works. I found these:

As you can see. All of these were at least 100 or more views, and less reads. The stats are not great but whatever. I thought maybe TIME for Google to log them might be a thing, but the snapchat one was very recent. Here are the stats for referral:

This to me means that nothing matters as long as the post itself is getting some attention. I couldn’t find the following :

Now yes, you’re right.. I was searching the titles of the stories. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that these last two would have been found if the title was the only factor? These guys have 4 or LESS views…

Anyways, so it occurred to me that this type of cataloging of my stories on Medium works really well for MEDIUM, but not so much for me.

Unless of course someone searches terms in the story and it shows up.

Is this the case? Only if I add “+ Medium” to my search:

It won’t benefit Medium OR me for discovery to have my stories cached.. but it’ll help Medium in rankings to have more and more cached attention grabbing posts, won’t it?

So anyways, I started trying to find that video I was first mentioning..

I couldn’t remember who or what the video came from so I Googled it:

Turns out I remembered “MOZ”. I clicked in, saw THIS guy…

Oh yeah, he was the instructor of the video… Click him!

What did I find… Whiteboard friday! That’s right.. the video was on a whiteboard!

At the end of my Googling and such, I found the video.. Take a look!

The reason that I think this is important is because it proves the Medium is benefiting from people writing, more than we are, in discovery. It’s a great home, but they’re getting more Points than I am.

The reason that I could find this Moz video was because of proper branding by this Rand Fishkin guy. Way to go dude!

So.. Write all you want. Write until you’re blue in the face. Unless you have some strategy, you’re writing to keep hands busy, and that’s all.