Medium and the future of blogging
Medium as a platform is something that I don’t think many people know of and not many people use. When I first used this website it was because my writing intensive class for Digital Storytelling had us submit all of our writing pieces on the site. If it had not been for that class, I would probably still not know what Medium is.
When this class first started, I advocated for using this platform as our class blogging site. The main reason why I chose to do this website over others, like Wix, is because of how easy Medium is to use. The site is easy to understand for beginners, but still allows the use of creative freedom when actually blogging. It is hard to balance between websites being functional and being fun to use. Medium as a platform is something that I think is unique, as in something that not a lot of people use, but that’s not Medium’s fault. I think traditional blogging as a platform is declining, as mirco-blogging is increasing in use with today’s society.
In 2017 Medium as a platform had over 60 million monthly readers, which is pretty impressive for a site that is not that old. On the other hand, in 2017 Twitter had around 328 million users on their site. This is why I think the “traditional” way of blogging will soon go out of style. More and more people in the up coming generation of consumers would rather watch YouTube, or read Twitter than go and find someone’s blog about a topic. People many use blogs as a way to find information on a certain topic of school projects or essays, and not just for fun.
The rise of YouTube has also help kill traditional blogging. YouTubers are now a thing kids what to be when they grow up, which wasn’t even invented when I was a child. In researching YouTube stats, I was able to find that the total number of YouTube monthly viewers worldwide, in 2019 so far, is 149 million. The total number of YouTube daily viewers worldwide is 63 million, and the amount of hours of video watched daily is more than 1 billion. What is crazy about that is it’s showing just how much people prefer video blogging over the traditional blogging form.
Ultimately, I see Medium’s future as a positive one. I do not think the site is going anywhere any time soon, and I think the site is incredibly useful for things like school projects or college classes which need a mass of people to be able to post all together on one platform. While I don’t think that was Medium’s original goal when creating their platform and site, I think that niche will help keep medium relevant in the future of blogging, and video blogging.
