Pros and Cons of Medium: 6 Reasons Why We Chose It

It’s been a while since Ev Williams founded Medium. In 2012., a lot of writers and bloggers finally got a platform that suited their needs. Nowadays, you can see a lot of businesses migrating their content (or at least a part of it) on this platform.

According to Medium, it’s

a platform to read, write, and interact with stories that matter most to you.

We’ve analyzed Medium to see the benefits and disadvantages it can bring to businesses. Here’s a list of 6 most important points with additional pros and cons:

1. Quality Content

Medium has a big audience and it grows rapidly. Due to its focus on perfecting the writing and reading experience, it was just a matter of time until it attracts writers and readers from all over the world. The result was simple and pleasing — a community gathered around quality content. This was the main reason why we decided to blog here.

Pros:

• Target audience. Medium allows you to reach the right audience with your content. Focused on tags and readers’ preferences, you will reach your target audience quickly since they can find you easily.
• Content you’re looking for. If your content is good, people will interact with it. Medium is not like Social Media platforms where you can see everything from cat videos to pages like Squatting Slavs In Tracksuits, it’s quality content that suits your needs.

Cons:

• Not a stand-alone. If you want to reach a wider audience, you have to promote your content on other platforms since the Medium community is still quite small.
• No control over content. Medium can be shut down without a warning. If your content is based on this platform, it can be lost forever when/if Medium decides to change its terms and conditions. Or when/if it completely shuts down.

2. User Experience

At first sight, the UI is gorgeous. Everything’s clear and simple, and the main focus is text. For a content based platform like Medium, the design fits the needs very well and almost every part of it is user friendly.

Pros:

• Good reading experience. A lot of white spaces, high quality typography, mobile optimization and overall simple, yet beautiful design are just some parts of user experience you get while reading a Story or scrolling through the feed.
• User friendly CMS. When writing a Story, all the options, tools and draft previews are easy to use and clearly designed.

Cons:

• No like/share distinction. When reading a Story, you can only respond (comment), highlight and share (recommend). There’s not a simple way of saying “I like this Story” without interacting with it in any way mentioned above. A simple Like or Love would do the job here.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the main reasons we decided to publish on Medium. With its wide audience and strong SEO ranking, it’s easier to hop on the train than to build your own (for now).

Pros:

• SEO ranking. In most cases, it’s tough to keep up with the SEO ranking. A great deal of keeping up with it goes to updating your content regularly. On Medium, your blog won’t suffer the ranking if you don’t post for a while.
• An optimized platform. When writing, Medium automatically matches your writing with appropriate HTML elements. For example, when you want a quote, just mark it as a quote and Medium will treat it like that in code. Same goes for all other elements (like headlines).

Cons:

• Helping Medium. If your blog is popular and frequently visited, you’re building SEO ranking for Medium. The traffic does not go to your website and Medium is the one that benefits from your writing and storytelling skills.

4. Publications

A lot of voices, one theme. Publication is a group of editors and writers who publish their Stories as a unity and as individuals. We chose a Publication and named it “Enfluar Agency Blog”, and there we’ll post all the industry-based Stories as members of Enfluar.

Pros:

• Good structure. There are three kinds of profiles on a Publication: owner, editors and writers. Whether you’re a Copywriter or any kind of editor in a Publication, you can edit and comment on Stories to make sure they’re following your Publication’s guidelines.

Cons:

• Design barriers. Although this is not a core feature of the platform, it’s hard to organize your content. Especially if you publish often. There are only a few options to organize your Stories (latest, trending, featured and tags) so you don’t have a complete control over your Publication design.

5. Features

We all like them. It’s fun to share and/or like something informative with your friends and colleagues. Despite the fact Medium allows sharing Stories outside the platform, most of the features are available when you sign in.

Pros:

• Tags. You can use them on your Stories to reach the target audience as a writer, and you can use them to find the topics you’re interested in as a reader.
• Highlights. A fun and useful feature. Every piece of text can be highlighted on each Story to emphasize a quote you want to share on your profile and in Story.

Cons:

• Analytics. Medium analytics are as basic as they can get. They analyze: number of views, visitors and minutes read for Publications, and views, reads, read ratio and recommends for Stories. If you’re a writer who cares about the read ratio and views, you’re going to be fine, but if you’re looking for something more developed, you’re not going to be satisfied.

6. All-Around Platform

One of the main reasons we decided to write on Medium is the time-saving factor. For a company like Enfluar, this is a deal-breaker — we don’t have to build our custom platform for blogging and we can always direct readers from Medium to our website and analyze the traffic (Medium allows UTM parameters). It’s basically everything you need from a blogging platform.

To Conclude

Medium is currently a big part of our strategy. It’s easy to use and offers a lot of handy tools which makes it simple and efficient. Although there are a few cons and one could argue they surpass the pros, we’re ready to take the risk and analyze the outcome.

The goal is to bring traffic on our website by using Medium and Social Media. This strategy is long-termed, so be sure to follow us to see the results.

What are your thoughts on our list? Type a response or recommend the Story if you liked it!