Which is better: Medium or Blog on your own website? (extensive comparison)
Medium is a great tool for blogging and spreading interesting ideas that can enrich people and teach them something useful.
But is Medium the right platform — from bloggers perspective? When is better to use Medium and when to write blog posts on your own website?
I won’t devote myself to a blog running on WordPress, because I want a blogging system that doesn’t require installation and constant maintenance. Therefore for my comparison, I chose Pixenio — new online website generator I wrote about in the previous article. I’m going to compare Medium with a blog made on Pixenio.
Let’s break it down in detail in terms of traffic, SEO (and what good old Uncle Google is to say about it 😉) and available features.
Medium will give you a large audience, but also a lot of competition
In terms of traffic, Medium boasts truly admirable numbers. According to the SimilarWeb portal, Medium has almost 209 millions of total visits per month. The community of people is really huge here, because Medium groups articles on different topics, from different authors, thus covers wide range of areas and subjects — from design and technical matters, through culture and sports to articles on beauty or food.
This means that Medium (hypothetically) can deliver high traffic if you make a blog on this platform. Potentially you can reach a huge mass of people from all over the world. And here we are at the key advantage of the Medium compared to the classic website, because classic website isn’t that far-reaching itself. Especially not when you’ve got a completely new website with a blog without history and you haven’t pumped much money into advertising.
But I need to emphasize that the fact that Medium itself has such a high traffic does not mean that your blog will also have it. You have a bigger chance that out of the total number of visits, a certain percentage of people will come to your article as well.
(Un)useful Publications
You can increase the chance to succeed on Medium. For example, by using the so-called Publications to which you can add your story. Publications group articles on a particular subject which are written by different bloggers — e.g. on UX design. Many regular readers follow Publications rather than specific authors because they provide more quality content.
Primarily readers don’t care who wrote the article, but what is it about. And thanks to this, Publications are so popular and have significant traffic.
But for you as a blogger, it brings also disadvantages — you become more or less anonymous author in a group of other authors and to build your own name (brand) will be much more difficult. Furthermore, you cannot publish anything you want. Your article must meet certain criteria set by each individual Publication. If your article is approved, it cannot be published anywhere else.
However, the main drawback is that after publishing within Publications, you have practically no impact on your article for several months to a year (this depends on the particular Publication).
I would like to get back to the Medium community for a moment. Having the potential to reach out to a large audience attracts many bloggers to start using Medium. This, however, means that new and new bloggers are joining, so you’ll compete with them every day. Visitors have only a certain amount of time dedicated to reading, so it can easily happen they’ll read someone else’s article instead of yours.
From this point of view your own website with a blog is more favourable option. There’ll be only your posts published on it and when the visitor lands on your page, no other blog or author will redirect his/her attention.
Medium is a good choice if you’re starting a new blog
What type of stories you write or would like to write can also be a decisive factor in choosing the blogging platform. For example, if you want to start with an adventure travel blog or just to try if you would enjoy blogging, Medium is a great solution for all “first attempts.” You do not need to create your own website, code or buy anything (subscription or domain) — you just create a Medium account and start writing right away. Just as creating Word or Google drive document.
Medium will suffice if you have no ambition to sell something :). Because Medium doesn’t itself provide any eCommerce options (as opposed to your own website).
Medium vs. Pixenio features
Blog post creation
Main feature of both platforms is simple writing of articles. Creating new posts, formatting them and inserting images is equally simple on both Medium and Pixenio.
In terms of the featured image, it is better thought over in Pixenio than in Medium, because Medium quite significantly deforms the main image. By default, Medium pulls the featured image from the images used in the article (you select which of them is to be featured when publishing article).
Unfortunately, if often happens that the image looks good in the article, but it doesn’t look nice as a featured image — especially at small size within the list of all blog posts. There is some strange resizing or positioning used in Medium.
Advanced SEO
As for the SEO settings, Pixenio is definitely a winner. Medium itself has no reason to promote just your article or to try to force Google to find it. In contrary — if you have your own website, you want and need your posts to be indexed and ranked at the highest positions in search results.
In the Pixenio blog, you can set up not only Title, but also nice URL link, as well as meta data like SEO Title or SEO Description where you can incorporate the selected keywords.
All this can help make your article to rank higher in the search results.
Using your own domain
You can have your own domain for your website on Pixenio, as well as on Medium like I do have: websitehate.me. It’s a good feature that I set up right at the beginning when I wrote my first post. Both platforms are the same in terms of this.
Contact and follow-up options
The fundamental difference between Medium and Pixenio is that it’s quite difficult to get in touch with the blog author in Medium, because Medium is not tailored to do this. So it is necessary to search a bit and try to reach the blogger in a different way, for example through some of the social networks.
On the contrary, if you have your website and blog on Pixenio, there are several options to get in touch with the blogger — via contact information page on the website, or directly via the contact form.
If we look at the platforms in terms of providing your fans to follow you up, it’s easier with Medium. If some reader likes articles of some author and starts following him/her up, Medium will prioritise new posts published by this author. Also Medium sends newsletter with the summary of the most read and most recent articles from favourite authors.
On the other hand, following (as we know it from social networks) is not possible on your own website. Securing regular traffic for your blog is therefore more challenging. It can be compensated in part by regularly adding status updates by new posts on Facebook or Twitter.
Options for eCommerce
As I mentioned above, Medium is great for blogging. But only until you have no intention of selling some product. If you plan to use blog to support your business, then Medium is not an ideal choice.
Let’s say you’re UI expert and besides advices in your articles you would like to sell your eBook on design. In this case, it is unambiguously better to choose a blog on your own website.
Your own website works as a sales channel and offers added value.
Price
You can have a blog on Medium completely free of charge what’s great. You have no extra costs. Pixenio is a paid service with a small monthly fee ($8), but for this price, you get not only blog itself, but a full-featured website with professional design and that’s all you need.
UPDATE: Pixenio offers now an ability to create a website and use it for 1 year completely for free. That’s a perfect opportunity to try this service.
You may incur additional costs if you decide to buy your own domain. You have to buy it yourself at another supplier. It’s entirely up to you, whether you want your own domain, which domain name provider you choose and for how much you obtain the domain. It isn’t a prerequisite neither for Medium, nor for Pixenio. And another upside of both platforms is that you don’t need to pay for web hosting at all.
Is own website on Pixenio better solution than blog on Medium?
It depends primarily on what you expect from your blog. If you want to try something out for the first time, or you just want to do blogging and do not need to be in contact with readers, Medium is the right choice for you. But if you plan to present yourself, your services or a portfolio in addition to writing a blog, and you would potentially want to acquire some customers, I recommend creating your own website on Pixenio.
Fortunately, nothing is just black and white.
With a small fee for Pixenio and free Medium account, you can utilize both of these platforms and work with larger audience. The reach of your unique content can be much bigger!
Republishing on Medium to get extra traffic
You may have already noticed that some bloggers publish their posts on both their own website as well as on Medium. But is this OK from Google’s point of view? Isn’t it a duplicate content?
It is. But never mind, because there’s a solution to that.
It is natural that whenever Google encounters same content on two pages, one of them gets penalized — the one which has lower authority and worse rating.
As Medium has high authority, it’s more than certain that it would be your website that would get penalized. However, it can be avoided if you adhere to a few principles:
1. Publish blog post on your website first.
2. Wait for at least 2 weeks before you re-publish it on Medium — this way you’ll give Google time to primarily index the article on your website (and only after that Google finds it elsewhere).
3. Never re-publish the article on Medium by doing simple CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Always import it via Medium tool which is designed for this.
By adding article via this import tool, rel="canonical"
url gets automatically inserted to ensure that all the credit goes to your original content residing at your own website. A duplicate (ie copied) article on Medium won’t be indexed by Google. The presence of the article on Medium will not endanger ranking of your website, but rather it may help it because it may increase traffic.
4. It is good if you change the title and featured image in the re-published article.
5. At the end of the blog post on Medium, always state the original article source, e.g. Originally published at babich.biz.
Short snippet with cliffhanger
There is one more way how to properly link a blog on your Pixenio website with Medium without getting penalized by Google. You can write just a short snippet on Medium, or more precisely a very interesting introduction that will entice the reader. Then you refer him to your website where he can finish reading the article.
A simple call to action like Keep reading is enough for Medium users to come to your website. This way you can greatly increase your web traffic with help of Medium.
Whether you finally choose your blog on Medium or Pixenio, remember that the most important of all is to have unique content that people want to read!
Well, which platform do you think is better for blogging? Do you prefer Medium or will you rather try your own website on Pixenio? Let me know what you think in the comment below!