3 ms·
Medium launches reader referral program
- tonystubblebine 5y agoI think it's fair to say this feature is targeted at authors who would be promoting themselves on Medium and will now get a big referral cut when they bring in a new subscriber. You can't even get into the referral program unless you are an author. And also the referral pages are all personalized to be promoting the author as the headline of a bigger Medium bundle. To me this looks like an interesting competitive move in the world of creators, i.e. Medium, ConvertKit, Substack, Revue. Medium's offering is network effects, bundling, email portability, but not yet email list import. So if you are starting a blog/newsletter from scratch you'd get network effects, meaning that you wouldn't be on the hook for finding every single subscriber yourself. And then bundling means you, presumably, would have an easier time closing the sale on a new subscriber: "Get my writing plus these other great things in the Medium platform." I did some survey work on the Better Programming readers (my pub there) and they were happy Medium subscribers but definitely factored in other pubs like The Pragmatic Programmers and Towards Data Science. It's not immediately obvious, but bundling really helps. For example, a bunch of top Substack authors left to start their own "Everything Bundle" because that was a much more effective way to grow. Email list portability is a must have for parity with the other options. Not being able to import a list is a major limiter for getting people to switch to Medium from other platforms. But if I were starting from scratch I would find Medium to be a pretty compelling option. (Caveat: I am biased because I do a lot on Medium as an author and publisher--more than 5M views every month)