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Comment by IronCoderXYZ | Hacker News Reader

Granted, publishing on Medium removes a lot of the author's own "branding"; but doesn't Medium also provide a certain level of visibility that would be quite hard to obtain if one were to publish individually?

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We're having this debate internally. I'm trying to motivate teams currently blogging in Medium to come back to the new CMS we're building for the whole company. Briefly, side A says, Medium is a well-known platform with good discoverability and a great writing experience, and having a popular high-ranked site outside of our core helps SEO. The other argument is mostly, we want our web properties to be more than a brochure, we want the voice of our company to speak "from it" rather than some other random place (even if one presently popular), we should avoid moving between fashionable 3rd party platforms, etc.

I am currently having this debate as well. One angle to consider: Medium presents a path for your writers to grow their own personal brand - instead of writing on medium as a company account they can write as their personal account.

The popup mentioned in the article is a huge detractor from Medium, so I'm still waffling.

Can Medium function as a funnel to your CMS? I assume there's nothing preventing a company or individual publishing on more than one place. Post to Medium with links back to your CMS. Blurbs, teasers, full articles - whatever suits your content and goals.

My point: it doesn't have to be an XOR choice.

you are correct, that's another facet of the debate (I tried to hit the high points). The argument against that is usually "as long as I'm there why don't I just write the damn article".

I mean, you don't write the article from scratch on each platform. The author should, ideally, be writing it locally and then placing it in all the places it's needed.

They should publish on their blog first and then use the import feature of Medium to republish it with a canonical to the original.

That's one thing I don't understand.

I can get 3000+ views pretty easily on a blog I haven't put much work in. (More like 30,000 or 50,000 if the post connects with people)

Somebody pushed me to put a post on Medium where it got 20 views.

I hear from people who are excited that they post to Medium and they get 60 views -- they think that is a lot but I think they are ignorant about what is possible.

So far as I can tell, Medium has tried to create a brand for blog posts that are a little bit better an average but really the posts there are a little bit worse than average. It seems like a ghetto for clickbait headlines that would appeal to HN readers but when you read the articles they are at best thinly sliced salami which doesn't satisfy.

Typically, less than 5% of an article's traffic has been coming from Medium for me (that's true for unpopular articles as well as more popular ones with more than a quarter million views).

So don't give the "visibility argument" too much weight.

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