Why I’d much rather write in Medium than my personal blog

Because, your thoughts are more important..

For a long time, I had been discouraging people from writing stuff on Medium and encouraging them to put it all up on their own blog.

After all, me being an online marketer, conventional wisdom mandates that you keep control of your work and any popularity or value that comes out of it needs to directly translate to your own blog.

But, all of that changed yesterday

I wrote a blog post yesterday, and it was on something that I thought a lot of people would sympathize with.

I was right — my friends on Facebook were sharing it, people were having conversations with me on IM about it, and the best part was the article was getting upvoted organically on Hacker News.

For a very brief few minutes, the topic was actually on the first page of HN, until..

Error Establishing a database connection

Who wants to upvote a story they can’t even read? Before I could actually go in and remedy the situation and do a MySQL reset, the story was buried under heaps of other stories that were now trending.

As a personal blogger, I don’t want to deal with fanning my server every time it crashes because a story goes viral.

Medium has virality built into their system

You don’t actually have to be “someone” with a marquee blog to trend in a place like Medium. If your story is good, it may actually go places even though you don’t have a tag associated with you.

This is very very powerful. Though Wordpress self-hosted, Blogger or Posterous could have solved the traffic scaling problem, they don’t have this sort of virality built into their platform.

Tumblr did try something similar, but I’m not the kind that likes posting cat pictures.

At the end of the day, I want more people reading what I write and would give up on some backlinks and branding for that.