Everything You Got Wrong About Medium
Because I love Medium, but I’m tired of typing the same comments over and over again…
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My history with Medium is long. Much longer than most folks’ here. Longer than both world wars, and almost as long as the D-Day Darlings’ career singing about it. It’s been eight long years. I’ve seen a lot, I’ve read a lot more, I’ve seen the platform start up, I’ve experienced starting my writing on it, see the paywall get launched, see new writers launch themselves into fame, and all throughout this time, Medium has stayed one of my favourite platforms out there. By far.
With every new cohort of writers joining, I notice the same pattern of assumptions, questions, and misinformation spreading. Though often it’s coming from a good place, I do think for the sake of this platform and the quality it’s trying to promote, it’s worth calling out and correcting all the misinformation out there. I do plan to link to this article in every comment going forward where it makes sense. Perhaps plenty of people will see it before jumping to ill-informed conclusions so that we start seeing less articles about Medium, and more about frankly anything else.
Medium is a social media platform
Wrong. Absolutely not true. I would urge every writer, new and old, to read Medium’s mission statement. To paraphrase, Medium is a democratised crowdsource publishing platform. Might sound like nuance to you, but it’s very different from bog-standard social media. Social media, for all intents and purposes, has no quality barrier. Medium does. Anyone can post anything on social media. You can tweet “burp” every time you burp, and it would be perfectly acceptable. Heck, you might even gain a solid follower-base, who would then re-burp all your burps. So, next time, don’t call it social media, or tell people that they can just come here and barf any two paragraphs and make sweet dollah’. Most paying readers come here for quality content, unique experiences, intriguing thoughts and views on the world. Don’t ruin it for everyone else by trying to use it like Facebook.
It matters when you post your stories
Could not be further from the truth. I could go by my 126 articles published over eight years, but that would only be anecdotal evidence, so I have something much better from Medium’s head of data science, where he explains it all in great detail. Long story short, it doesn’t matter when you publish. You can bend over backwards to try to prove the opposite, it would be futile. What will make a difference is the quality of your story. That of course includes formatting. Oh, and please be accessible while you’re at it, OK?
Being a top writer, matters
Only half true. While there were bonuses at one point for top writers, that hasn’t been the case for a while now. Truth be told, it’s a vanity badge for the most part. They also come and go based on the topics you write about. Being a top writer doesn’t mean you’ll get paid more per read, nor that your stories will get distributed more, but readers who read by topics, will see your profile popping up or when checking out your profile, will see you are a top writer in some category, which can generate more followers, readers and subscribers, which could in turn boost somewhat your Medium Partner Program income.
Chosen for distribution results virality
Let’s start with the fact that you should not be writing to go viral, but to share your original thoughts or knowledge and offer readers quality material. The often overly vocal disappointment of many new writers who finally get chosen for distribution and then barely get an extra ten reads is unfounded. Getting distributed is a long-term benefit. What it means practically for you is that your old-ass article from four years ago will still get put in front of readers who might enjoy reading it, and thus generate money. The way I see it, it’s better you make $200 off an article over two years, than $50 in a week, and then nothing for the rest of its life, unless you yourself promote it.
Follower-count matters
Technically, false. If you’d start a brand-new account now and convince 10,000 Medium users to follow you, you could still have zero views and zero reads for all eternity, if they don’t care about anything you write. Now, realistically this won’t happen, the higher the follower-count, inevitably the higher the reader numbers will go, even if they’re just 5% of your follower-count. But this also highlights a couple of things.
The follow-for-follow game is silly and won’t get you anything apart from being “allowed” into the Medium partner program, which will mean nothing when you’re yearly income will tally up to exactly $0.27. Your best bet is to get followers organically. There’s a much higher chance they’ll read your stuff later, too. If you saw them clap or comment (something intelligent) too as they followed you, you can bet at some point they’ll come back and read some more of your stories.
The 100 followers barrier is high and stupid
It’s not. If anything, it’s far too low. Doing a quick cost-benefit analysis, the effort you have to put in to get those 100 followers organically is infinitely lower than YouTube’s policy. Stop whining, start writing.
There’s also another aspect to keep in mind, which you probably never thought of before. When signing up for the medium partner program, you fill out a form, you get registered for taxes and get connected to a Stripe account. All of that requires internet infrastructure and cost. If everyone got into the program from day one and zero followers, it would put a lot more strain on all that infrastructure and — because people are lazy and get bored easily — a huge amount of those accounts would end up abandoned. It’s more than fair for Medium to want to see you put in some elbow-grease before deciding you’re trying hard enough, and you’re committed.
Writers with thousands of followers and no stories are bots
This one makes me smile. It shows how unfamiliar people are with Medium’s history. The “writers” with thousands of followers, and not a single story written, are not writers, they’re readers. They’re also likely veterans like me, who got followed over the years by a number of folks.
There are also writers who got incredibly pissed off then Medium introduced the partner program and deleted all their stories and moved them somewhere else. Hackernoon, for instance, used to be a publication here that moved onto its own platform and took many writers with them, who then to avoid SEO complications and likely out of spite, deleted their stories from Medium.
A third potential reason I completely forgot about, but Henrik Ståhl pointed out in the comments, is back in the days, (only old farts like him and I remember those days) when people created a Medium account using Twitter, all users who had connected their Twitter accounts to Medium and followed you on Twitter, automatically became Medium followers.
Non-paying writers are leeches
They’re not, and that’s a very limited way of thinking. The world is a very diverse place, which means context changes every time you cross a border. Indeed, for someone like me, living in Ireland a monthly membership costs less than half an hour’s wages, while for my parents in Romania that means 2.5 hours’ wages in a much worse economy than Ireland’s. What’s a coffee for you, for someone else in another part of the world it might be a day’s food for an entire family, so demanding they pay for a membership, so you can get two extra cents for their read into your bank account is both ignorant and insensitive. Empathy. If you were not born with it, learn it.
If that’s not enough, let me ask you — which publisher forces you to become a subscriber before being able to write stories for them? I don’t know of any. Medium follows the exact same pattern every news publication around the world does. Simple as that. Get with the program, and focus on writing great stories, would you?
Medium is a community of writers
It’s not. It’s not its prime purpose anyway. Read the mission statement again. If Medium were a community of writers, it’d be long dead. It’s simply not a sustainable business model, writers paying each other to read their stuff. A successful publishing platform — which Medium aims to be — needs exponentially more readers than writers. I would say 500 active readers for every writer, but that’s just a guesstimate, I could very well be underestimating. Yes, inevitably, some connections get created over time between writers and some sense of community develops, but it’s really just like having colleagues at The New York Times, nothing more. They don’t write for you, and you don’t write for them, but occasionally, you do happen to read each other’s stuff.
Summa summarum…
It all comes down to what Medium really is — a publishing platform. Treat it as seriously as if you were at The Independent, The New York Times or whichever your favourite publisher may be, except having a boss and time-lines. You decide when to write, what topic to write about and how often, but at the end of the day, you should aim to have a unique voice, educate and provoke new ways of thinking. To quote Medium itself…
We’re creating a new model for digital publishing. One that supports nuance, complexity, and vital storytelling without giving in to the incentives of advertising. It’s an environment that’s open to everyone but promotes substance and authenticity. And it’s where deeper connections forged between readers and writers can lead to discovery and growth. Together with millions of collaborators, we’re building a trusted and vibrant ecosystem fuelled by important ideas and the people who think about them.
Seriously. What’s so difficult to understand? Stop overthinking it all, and start writing real stories. I’m dying to read some…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!
