The platform Medium is not the answer

Is it better to build it or to follow it?

The answer depends on the purpose, but I would argue that using Medium.com to publish all your contents is not a good idea.

Medium platform gives you a lot of goodies as a writer and content creator.

• It’s easy to use;
• there is already an established community of readers and writers who visit this platform;
• High-profile famous people and brands are using it;
• It’s easy to set up and there is zero maintenance cost.

What else you would desire?

Beside the benefits there are some very serious constrains to consider.

The business model

Looking at the Medium.com business model is subscription base without ads.

This is a very good news, especially now when many people are a concern for their privacy and don’t want to hear anything about tracking cookies. However, if you don’t want to pay and subscribe to Medium, you have the chance to read only 3 articles per month. Now imagine you want to reach too many people and not only to the subscribers of Medium, what is the chance of the banner they see prompting them to register to frustrate them? It seems a pretty big chance.

And what is the chance your desired readers to had reached the 3 articles limit already and to be unwilling to pay for more?

Unless your readers are paying for Medium already, choosing it as a published platform could significantly limit your reach.

The glamor

There are a lot of famous people posting on Medium and if you are not one of them yet, there is a big chance your article won’t be recommended as a top content, just because people who are already established and famous naturally attract more followers.

Then being on Medium can just decrease your chances for someone to read your posts and by doing that decrease your efforts to reach out to as many people as possible,

Suddenly all the benefits of using Medium become not so appealing as they used to.

Another opinion

I had to update my post in 2020, because I also found this interesting article: https://wptavern.com/freecodecamp-moves-off-of-medium-after-being-pressured-to-put-articles-behind-paywalls
According to it, a popular news portal – freecodecamp had also made the switched after they were pressured by Medium to allow only member who paid Medium subscription to see their articles. They are very popular in the developer community and being pressured like that raised a lot of questions about the model the Medium platform is using. However, if you are just starting, it is okay for you to use Medium, just take into an account that the future might not be so bright once you become extremely famous one day.

Summary

Medium.com is not for everyone. If you are small and not so well-known author, it is better to start with your own controlled platform and invest in SEO to increase their rank in the search engine.

Overtime you can move to Medium.com if you desire and reduce your maintenance overhead or the other option is to continue posting on your platform and copy the content to Medium as well.

I wish you happy blog posting!