Member-only story
Illumination vs. the Ascent: Can This New Pub Really Defeat a Colossus
How Illumination is becoming the most popular publication on Medium
2022 Update — Ascent is not on Medium anymore. Illumination still shines.
Yesterday, 529 people followed Illumination. Only 100 followed the Ascent. The total reading time is 11,958,342 minutes for Illumination. Its writers earned more than half a million dollars in its first year 🍻.
If you are a writer, you think — all the time.
‘Will a big publication accept my story?’ you think. If you are a decent writer — the plagiarist is an indecent one — and you submit a story to Illumination, you can safely assume that it will be published. This is the spirit of writing on Medium.
Why are the editors of huge publications so finicky? Because they accept the best and reject the rest. Illumination is the only publication that publishes your work as it is. It allows new writers to learn by making mistakes.
Medium elevates the stories it chooses for further distribution — but the Illumination team promotes almost everybody. Some of our editors rank stories for…
