Why You Should Write on Medium
9 Awesome Reasons and Benefits
Celebrating Medium!
Medium is a blogging and publishing platform with a social networking aspect. Former co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams, created Medium in 2012.
Zulie Rane, a prolific Medium writer with 63K followers as of date, has a very cute way of describing Medium-
If WordPress and Twitter had a baby that could pay you for writing, that would be Medium.
Many of the online social media platforms are rampant with distasteful content that don’t add value or benefit others. However, Medium has worked arduously to make sure they aren’t classed in with the rest. For years they’ve kept their platform clean, curated and healthy for all kinds of readers to enjoy.
What are the popular categories on Medium?
As per statistics, popular categories on Medium are as follows:
- Health (374k)
- Blockchain (473k)
- Life (520k)
- Technology (334k)
- Politics (396k)
In addition, there is also a substantial interest in finance, news, programming, video games, and more on the platform.
Below are some reasons that should inspire you to write on Medium:
1. Medium has a huge audience base
The total number of registered users on Medium (that is, people who have created a Medium account) currently amounts to more than 54 million.
In addition to registered users, Medium has a huge number of external readers who find Medium articles (called stories on Medium) through the following:
- Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bingo,
- social media platforms (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Facebook), or
- through emails received that contain direct links to articles on the Medium platform.
Hence, a writer has a sizeable audience for getting exposure.
Medium’s readers are pre-segmented for a writer. When a writer publishes a story on Medium, Medium recommends his/her story to other people.
If you publish your story in a publication on Medium, the editors of publications curate themed and topical stories, and these publications are followed by readers on Medium. If a writer’s story is accepted in a publication about data management, then he/she can be confident that those interested in data management will view the story.
There are about 13K publications on Medium.
As per Kristina God’s article-Introducing Medium’s Top 10 Publications In 2022 To Write For, the 10 top Medium publications in 2022 are:
1 The Startup/ Start it up (760K)
2 Towards Data Science (636K)
3 Better Humans (338K)
4 The Writing Cooperative (240k)
5 Entrepreneur’s Handbook (219K)
6 Better Programming (207K)
7 Mind Cafe (135K)
8 Better Marketing (120K)
9 Illumination (57K)
10 Invisible Illness (52K)
2. You Can Earn Money Through Medium
Writers can earn by signing up through Medium Partner Program. Joining is free. However, there are eligibility criteria to be met before a writer can apply to the program and earn.
The eligibility criteria for applying to the Medium Partner Program are as follows-
- You have to publish at least one story;
- You need to have at least 100 followers to apply;
- You must publish at least one story every six months to keep earning.
The Medium Partner Program allows member writers to make money in two main ways:
- The amount of time paying subscribers spend reading their stories (member reading time).
- Through Medium’s new Referred Membership program.
In addition, top writers on Medium earn monthly bonuses.
3. Simple, Easy, and Fast
- Medium offers a straightforward and easy-to-use text editor that helps users write and format their stories before publishing them on the platform. However, you do need to check out grammar mistakes as Medium does not do that for you.
- Once you have finished writing your piece, you can publish it in a matter of seconds. The process is automated. It is simple, fast and easy.
- On Medium, once you publish an article, it will sit in your profile, but you can also submit drafts to publications. These publications are themed collections of articles organized by an editor who is generally a Medium writer and user. Publishing your story in a publication can give your work more visibility.
- You can also republish articles that you publish on Medium on other sites and vice versa. You can import your content from any other platform or from your personal website and re-publish it. Authors are not penalized for duplicate content publication. However, it is recommended not to publish exactly the same content. Medium allows you to modify the imported content too.
- There is no minimum word count to publish your story. However, if you want to be successful as a writer, I would not recommend going below the 500 words mark. As per data analyzed by Dmytro Iakubovskyi, Senior Data Scientist and prolific writer on AI, his article, Explaining claps based on 6750 Medium articles from the data science domain — SHAP values for publications, tags, and reading times, longer articles with more reading time have more claps that is more appreciation.
4. It is Open to All
As Medium founder (and Blogger creator/Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams wrote when he first launched the platform in 2012:
“Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.”
Medium is open to all. It allows all kinds of writers — from novice to skilled writers to share their thoughts, perspectives, knowledge, experiences, and ideas.
You can write fiction, non-fiction, or poetry; You can write about art, science, health, geography, history, and more. However, your story/article needs to adhere to Medium’s content guidelines and rules as per this post on Medium Rules.
Especially for people who are new to the field of writing, the Medium is a great platform to hone their writing and marketing skills. Anyone who has a Medium account can write on the platform — there is no other vetting process involved.
5. No/Minimal SEO needed
With very little SEO knowledge (fundamentally, being able to pick a keyword and make sure it appears often in your post), your story is very likely to rank high in Google search results.
6. You Own Your Content
In contrast to some journals and publishers, which ask for a copyright transfer, you own your content on Medium. Medium does not ask for transfer of copyright or even an exclusive license.
7. Procuring Other Opportunities
As stated by Zulie Rane, a prolific writer on Medium,
Writing on Medium is the journey, not the destination.
Medium can be used as a platform to acquire other opportunities. For example, as stated in her blog article — Is Writing On Medium in 2021 Still Worth It?, Zulie Rane has used Medium to:
- gain freelance blogging clients,
- grow her YouTube channel, and
- grow her newsletter.
Jotform founder Aytekin Tank uses Medium as a lead generator for his business.
As stated by Zulie Rane, in her blog article — Is Writing On Medium in 2021 Still Worth It?,
“The real power of Medium is that it’s a landing pad to build your portfolio, your business, and your writing skills.”
8. Story Statistics and Analytics
If you want to succeed as a writer in Medium in the long term, you need the ability to assess your performance or rather the performance of your stories analytically. Medium analytics makes this easy for you!
Medium provides real-time statistics and a visualization dashboard on a number of elements to indicate how a user’s stories are performing. Some of these elements are:
- Views — visitors who clicked on a story’s page;
- Reads — viewers who read your story;
- Fans — represent the number of readers who clapped for your story;
- Read Ratio — percentage of article/story views which resulted in article/story reads. For example, if there were two story views and one story read, the read ratio would be 50%.
Some statistics are:
- Number of views for an article,
- Number of reads for an article,
- Number of fans for an article,
- Average time spent reading the article,
- Total number of views per day,
- Total number of reads per day,
- Total number of fans per day.
The screenshot below shows my stories and statistics analytics dashboard created by Medium. This 30 day visualization gives a summarized figure for the number of views, reads and fans over a 30 day period. In addition, it also gives me a day to day count for the same.
Right below the bar chart, Medium also shows me the number of views, reads, read ratio, and fans till date for each article, which tells me how my article is doing.
Medium also allows writers to look at story/article-specific statistics such internal views , external views, average reading time and member reading time.
Medium breaks down external traffic by broad sources:
These statistics serve as inputs to revisit and revise your writing and marketing strategies and improve your future stories.
9. Success Stories
Last, but not the least the below success stories should motivate you to write on Medium!
Zulie Rane: — I came to Medium in September of 2018 with zero professional writing background — just a desire to write about my cats. In the three years since, I’ve made over $70K writing on Medium in the last three years. $40K of that is from the last 12 months alone!
Victoria Kurichenko: — I’ve earned $9k+ from the Medium Partner Program, $2,000 in bonuses, and $3,000 as an affiliate in 2 years.
Concluding Thoughts
Building and maintaining your own blog involves a lot of work, such as choosing a content management system, finding an ideal hosting provider, and creating an SEO strategy.
Publishing your article in a traditional newsletter involves few days’ time lag, as the process of review and acceptance takes some time.
If you want to create and publish content fast without having to deal with the wait time involved in a traditional publication (that does not have a 100% guarantee of acceptance) or the more cumbersome and technical aspects of creating and maintaining your own blog, then Medium is the place for you.
Thanks so much for reading and I hope you found the content useful! I would love to hear your thoughts and comments!
Rupa Mahanti is a consultant, data enthusiast, researcher, writer, spiritualist, and author of several books, mostly on data. She is also publisher of “The Data Pub” newsletter on Substack.
References
Casey Botticello, October 10, 2021, Medium Blog Statistics in 2022. Bloggingguide.com
Zulie Rane, Is Writing On Medium in 2021 Still Worth It?, ZulieWrites.com
Stefan Campbell, November 1, 2022, Medium Platform Statistics 2022: Users, Valuation & Readership Data Of Medium.Com, The Small Business Blog
