Medium is Exposure
Medium is full of people trying to get a message out there. Whether that message is GMOs are bad or good or that the author’s website/business is really unique and innovative, everyone has a message. Medium is a free platform that allows ordinary people get their message out to a larger audience. While there are many messages out there, there are just as many products/services being sold.
Medium is a good place to cut your teeth in the art of blogging, but also, as more and more small businesses are finding out, it’s a good place to promote your own website. This is the majority of what I see on Medium: people writing blog posts for exposure in hopes that this will link them back to their website, making them money. This is a good strategy to grow your audience. This tactic includes making articles that are interesting enough to get people to read (usually not putting them behind a paywall to reach the largest number of people) and then linking back to their own website so they get the traffic and ad revenue. This strategy is very common on the internet today.
Exposure is the name of the game when it comes to making money on the internet. The more people who hear/are directed to your site, the more money you’ll make from ad revenue and the sale of products (whether those be affiliate or otherwise). Medium is a good platform for people to make a name for themselves. Sometimes you get lucky and end up on the home page which leads to a sharp increase in article views. This is why a lot of people trying to start a website are using Medium to get their name out there. Exposure for their website is the goal.
There seem to be few people blogging without a commercialized agenda on Medium. From what I’ve seen, it’s products, websites, podcasts, music, services, games, movies, and more being peddled through post after post. One blogger I followed talked about cryptocurrency in every post, but at the end of each one, they linked back to their own website claiming to have “solved some of cryptocurrency’s problems.” I have found few people who blog without this purpose of generating traffic in mind. It’s not a bad strategy, but my eyes grow weary seeing plug after plug of someone’s personal business on a blogging platform. It’s not always annoying, but it’s always obvious to the trained eye to the point that commercialism is synonymous with blogging.
Personally, I have fun with Medium. I enjoy getting my thoughts out of my head and into the world for everyone to see. The lack of customization on Medium made it a lot easier to focus on what I was writing and less on the aesthetic of my blog. This allowed me to focus in on my content more than anything else. It is very accessible and intuitive with the trade-off being lack of customization for the user, a notable trade-off but a necessary one in order to get the kind of base Medium seems to want. Blogging is great, and Medium is a great place to get started.
The future of blogging is another avenue to sell. It already is in a lot of ways. People are always looking for new ways for their products. Blogging is a great way to reach those audiences, especially in targeted demographics like blogs tend to accumulate. The more monetization that happens with blogs, the less personal it becomes. While I don’t believe personal blogging is going away anytime soon, Medium is helping expedite the process from personal to commercial.
