MEDIUM MEMBERSHIP
The End to Free Non-Member Reads on Medium
Medium removed free non-member reads and no one is talking about the implications
To read this story for free, click here.
One of the great things about writing on Medium is its search engine optimization (SEO, for short). Or at least, it was.
This article isn’t about the merits of SEO marketing, though.
Throughout most of Medium’s existence, one of the platform’s greatest draws has been the way its articles can be found through searches on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and other browsers. But with Medium’s latest update, they’ve quietly done away with the ability for any of our articles to actually be read in this way. People who click on them will be told to make a free account — which, even then doesn’t allow them to read any of the stories of the site’s paid authors.
This strategy is an enormous shift, and it’s one I’m surprised that I haven’t yet found being discussed, either by Medium staff or any of its members. The approach marks a stark change from the one that the all-inclusive community for writers had always taken in the past.
Last year, I published an article called “Lucid Dreams Vs. Vivid Dreams,” that, up until this…
