Exun’s Moved To Medium
We recently migrated our blog, ln(exun), over to Medium after having run it on Wordpress for over 7 years. Here’s why.
Having at one point received 400,000 monthly visitors, the readership for ln(exun) had declined steadily from 2010 to 2016. This was in large part due to our own inactivity: a look at the ln(exun) archive reveals that we’d made a large number of posts each month from 2002 (the year of the blog’s inception) to 2010; after 2010 the number of monthly posts declined, until eventually there were as many posts per year as there had been per month. Another factor that contributed to the decline of ln(exun)’s readership was the rise of social networks — Facebook and Twitter exploded in popularity at about the same time that ln(exun) began to lose popularity. People could now consume content directly from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, and didn’t need to go over to their favorite websites every time they wanted to read new posts and articles.
Why We Moved
The reason Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Medium are so popular is because of the ‘feed’: a continuous stream of content from multiple sources, tailored to your interests. It’s super convenient: just a couple of scrolls through your feed and you’re all caught up. That’s part of why people have been migrating from Wordpress to Medium: Medium connects your writing to the world through its feed and recommendation engine.
The feed contributed to the success of these services, but it also killed a plethora of others. Take a look at the Google Trends data for Wordpress for the past 5 years:
Interest in Wordpress is dying, slowly but surely. It’s not because it’s inferior (it too has its bells and whistles), but because Wordpress blogs live in a vacuum, with little scope for getting your writing seen by those who might be interested in it.
Another factor that motivated us to move is that Medium takes away the headache of having to style your blog by removing that ability almost entirely.
