The Magic of Medium
I’ve been writing a blog called Startups and Burritos on and off for about three years. I’ve been using WordPress and it’s been a solid and dependable platform. But a few weeks ago, I wrote my first post on Medium…and it was kind of magical.
Why I posted on Medium
I had an account at Medium for probably a year or more but never posted anything. I don’t know if they ramped up the frequency of their email marketing but the past few months my inbox had been flooded with recommendations from my friends and people I respect in the startup community. It felt like everyone else was already at the party, so I finally pulled the trigger and made my first post. Here’s what I discovered.
Killer UI
If you’ve ever written a post on Medium, the first thing you notice is that the the UI is seamless, incredibly intuitive and elegant. All the noise is stripped away and you’re left with a dead simple interface that includes only the essentials. But truthfully, I think the user interface is just the tip of the iceberg of why Medium is such a great platform.
Medium Bakes Distribution Right into the Product
The real magic of Medium is that it’s not a blogging platform. It’s a content discovery community where distribution and content discovery are baked right into the product.
Why is this important? It’s important because if no one sees your blog post, then let’s be honest, it’s really just a diary. Blogging is about sharing ideas and connecting with people. The only way that happens is if people see what you write.
In order for people to see your blog posts, there are two critical elements:
(1) content
(2) distribution
Most people in the startup world will tell you that content is more important than distribution, but in three years of blogging and 7 years of startups, I’ve found that this is simply not true. In the real world, you need good content and good distribution, but I’ve found that distribution ends up being more important. Here’s an example from a parallel world.
Rudolf Leopold and Egon Schiele
In Vienna, there is an art museum called the Leopold, which is made up almost entirely from the private collection of Rudolph and Elizabeth Leopold. The museum houses the largest collection of Egon Schiele paintings in the world, worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.
Egon Schiele was a celebrated figurative painter who died at the age of 28 in 1918. After this death, his work fell out of favor in the art community and by the 1950s, he had been completely forgotten.
But Rudolph Leopold, a doctor in Vienna, found his work beautiful and in the early 1950s he started buying up his paintings on the cheap, as everyone at the time thought they were crap. Once sly, old Rudolf had amassed a huge collection of Schiele’s paintings, he started hosting exhibitions and promoting them to the European art community. These exhibitions would become an incredible distribution channel to increase the popularity (and value) of the Schiele paintings.
Leopold was basically going around to people and saying “hey dude, check out this Egon Schiele guy. He’s kinda the shit, you know?” And people at first were like “meh…I don’t know. I’m more a Jackson Pollack guy. I love how he aimlessly splatters paint everywhere. That’s, you know, like, what art is all about, man.” But Leopold just kept plugging away and was like, “Dude. You’re a fucking idiot. You seriously gotta check out this Schiele guy. He’s dope.” And after awhile, people just finally broke down and were like “okay, yeah, this is dope. Egon Schiele is the man. I want to have his babies!!”
What is the point of this story? The point is without Leopold, there is no Schiele.
Art, writing, music, startups — they’re all the same. Of course good content is critical. But good content only gets you a seat at the table. At the end of the day, a product, whether it is a startup, a piece of art or a blog post is only as good as its distribution.
And this, I believe, is where Medium truly shines.
Medium = Community + Distribution
With Medium, the distribution is baked right into the product. This is the polar opposite of WordPress.
To be fair, Wordpress is a great blogging platform. But it’s completely DIY. After you write a post, it is 100% up to you to promote your blog on social media, build subscribers, and generally hustle to get eyeballs to your site.
What’s magical about Medium is that it eliminates the hustle.
Instant Community
The minute I signed up for a Medium account, I imported my Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin connections and I had an instant community of readers. On day one of using Medium (with absolutely zero effort expended) I literally had twice as many subscribers than I had cultivated on WordPress after three years of blogging.
RoboDistribution
Medium doesn’t just build your community for you, it promotes your posts to your community as well.
When I finished my first post on Medium, I didn’t have to push it out to my network on social media like I normally would have to with WordPress. Medium automatically shared it with my Medium followers. Easy-peazy. No hustle on my end.
Performance Comparison
So how does Medium actually perform compared to WordPress
On Jan 1st, I wrote an identical post on Medium and WordPress called The Habit of No. Here’s a breakdown of how they performed.
On Medium, the post got 572 views since January 1st. On Wordpress the post got 1724 views. However, about 900 of the views on the WordPress blog came from the fact that the post got picked up in the Startup Digest weekly reading list on Jan 16th. If we take out that outlier day, the numbers are much closer: 572 on Medium vs. 824 on Word Press
While WordPress beat out Medium by a couple hundred views, I don’t think the absolute numbers tell the whole story because I had shared the WordPress link on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and did absolutely zero to promote the Medium link. In other words, the 824 views on WordPress were at least in part a result of me having to hustle. Whereas all 572 visits on Medium were purely organic. In my opinion, this is a big win for Medium.
On WordPress, the post got a total of 1724 views.
Content Discovery
The last thing I want to touch on that I really loved about Medium is the content discovery element of the platform. On Medium, community members can recommend a post. It’s akin to a like on Facebook, a favorite on Twitter or a reblog on Tumblr. Every time someone would recommend my blog post, I would stalk their profile. From there I was able to discover the blog posts that they had written. Before I knew, it I was bouncing from one blog post to the the next, falling down what felt like a Wikipedia rabbit hole of awesome.
Which Platform Should You Use?
If I had to sum it up, I would say that WordPress is a fully customizable but siloed tool where you have to promote your posts through other social distribution platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. It feels a bit like yesterday.
Medium on the other hand is a content discovery community where the product itself is the distribution platform. Just write a post and you let the product take care of the rest. To me this feels more like the future.
If you’re a professional blogger, and it’s critical to your livelihood, I think WordPress with all its customizable tools is still a better bet than Medium. But if you’re a casual blogger like me who posts once a month or once a quarter, then Medium, with it’s baked in community and distribution is likely a better bet.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, WordPress is the 800 pound gorilla in the blogging world. With roughly 25% of the world’s websites running on WordPress, it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s a dependable, trustworthy, and useful utility. But to me Medium is magical. As a content creator, Medium doesn’t just solve a problem you know you have (content distribution) it sucks you in and solves a problem you didn’t even know you had (content discovery). That is precisely what great products do, and this is why it’s magical.
I think the lesson to learn from Medium is that if you’re the newcomer trying to knock off the 800 pound gorilla in your space, your product can’t just be useful. That’s not good enough. If you are building the future — if you are truly trying to change the landscape, you better bring the magic.
