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I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text,

I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?

Aeolun 7y ago
Originally it was their easy editor. Now I just don’t know, since every other blog copied the editor.
ukulele 7y ago
Built-in audience of readers
- regnerba 7y ago
  I would be really curious how much of an effect that has. I have only ever gone to Medium because I followed a link to a post. Never because I was browsing Medium and found another article to read. I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.
  - MivLives 7y ago
    I post on Medium. I don't really promote anything I write. I get around 50-100 views per thing I write. Why do I do it? Well honestly I have no where else in mind. I don't have any one looking for my blog, I'm not really going to spam Hacker News or Reddit, or Discord rooms with links to get organic outreach. I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me. Medium can tell you where your readers come from. Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    A friend has a blog -- about the history of labor & work -- that he often cross-posts to Medium. He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours. Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.
    - mathnmusic 7y ago
      Could these 30,000 reads be from bots/crawlers? Medium has all the incentives to boost up the number of reads, don't they? I'd wanna measure engagement metrics outside their domain instead.
      - rchaud 7y ago
        Yeah, I'd be interested in knowing this too. Seems unlikely that a niche topic would generate so many human views in a short period of time. I do CMS management for a national nonprofit website with a few million hits each month, and 30k views for a single article with no promotion strategy seems...unlikely. Our Google Analytics filters out bots and crawlers, which do significantly inflate pageview stats.
        freddie_mercury 7y ago
        That particular article wasn't a niche though, it was about the so-called Millennial work ethic, Hannah Arendt's notion of labor vs work, "bullshit jobs", and so on.
dickeytk 7y ago
I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though I've never enabled the pay wall myself. I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's dependencies.
- yingw787 7y ago
  I’ve found the editor to not be as great when it comes to including code blocks, widgets, or other javascript I want to execute. Hugo is a lot more flexible in that sense. You can include graphviz and charts.js no problem, and keep your network request below 1mb. On the other hand, Hugo’s quality is verrrry dependent on the theme you pick. Configs change from theme to theme. Hand rolling a theme from scratch is also a severe pain. I don’t think there are any paid themes for Hugo, and if there are I’m not sure it’s as good of an ecosystem as say Wordpress.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.
  - dickeytk 7y ago
    That’s not at all why I used it. And the analytics medium has (even though it’s basic) are better than any third-party tools I’ve used.
- nickjj 7y ago
  > I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser? This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.

I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?

Aeolun 7y ago

Originally it was their easy editor. Now I just don’t know, since every other blog copied the editor.

ukulele 7y ago

Built-in audience of readers

regnerba 7y ago
I would be really curious how much of an effect that has. I have only ever gone to Medium because I followed a link to a post. Never because I was browsing Medium and found another article to read. I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.
- MivLives 7y ago
  I post on Medium. I don't really promote anything I write. I get around 50-100 views per thing I write. Why do I do it? Well honestly I have no where else in mind. I don't have any one looking for my blog, I'm not really going to spam Hacker News or Reddit, or Discord rooms with links to get organic outreach. I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me. Medium can tell you where your readers come from. Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  A friend has a blog -- about the history of labor & work -- that he often cross-posts to Medium. He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours. Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.
  - mathnmusic 7y ago
    Could these 30,000 reads be from bots/crawlers? Medium has all the incentives to boost up the number of reads, don't they? I'd wanna measure engagement metrics outside their domain instead.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      Yeah, I'd be interested in knowing this too. Seems unlikely that a niche topic would generate so many human views in a short period of time. I do CMS management for a national nonprofit website with a few million hits each month, and 30k views for a single article with no promotion strategy seems...unlikely. Our Google Analytics filters out bots and crawlers, which do significantly inflate pageview stats.
      - freddie_mercury 7y ago
        That particular article wasn't a niche though, it was about the so-called Millennial work ethic, Hannah Arendt's notion of labor vs work, "bullshit jobs", and so on.

dickeytk 7y ago

I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though I've never enabled the pay wall myself. I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's dependencies.

yingw787 7y ago
I’ve found the editor to not be as great when it comes to including code blocks, widgets, or other javascript I want to execute. Hugo is a lot more flexible in that sense. You can include graphviz and charts.js no problem, and keep your network request below 1mb. On the other hand, Hugo’s quality is verrrry dependent on the theme you pick. Configs change from theme to theme. Hand rolling a theme from scratch is also a severe pain. I don’t think there are any paid themes for Hugo, and if there are I’m not sure it’s as good of an ecosystem as say Wordpress.
sytelus 7y ago
Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.
- dickeytk 7y ago
  That’s not at all why I used it. And the analytics medium has (even though it’s basic) are better than any third-party tools I’ve used.
nickjj 7y ago
> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser? This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.