Why I'm Leaving Medium
praxis.fortelabs.co
praxis.fortelabs.co
A book deal is decent money, seemingly everyone gets an advance in the $200k range. But more importantly, it's a huge career level up for someone like Tiago. Every activity that doesn't build up your mailing list ends up being kind of a waste of time.
I suspect that Tiago could actually make more money on Medium publishing behind their paywall than he's going to make in his personal subscription program. But it's not enough that it should be his focus.
Also, I assume incentives will change again at Medium down the road as they keep trying to make the deal work for more and more authors. So maybe he'll come back, if just to cross post.
The author argues that Medium attempts to imitate all-you-can-eat model of Spotify and Netflix but for written text. This model depends on grabbing attention as much as possible by random stream of articles each providing small dopamine hit instead of providing long term value to determined readers who are willing to put in work to digest complex long-form content. Currently they also don’t allow you to connect back to your followers. This means it’s hard to build tribe of serious audience, forced to write simple attention grabbing short pieces and depend on vitality lottery/luck factor to get paid.
123 votes to where should I publish my posts:
- 34% Medium
- 9% Dev.to
- 45% My company's official blog
- 12% LinkedIn, my domain, ???
This tells me that - even if Medium continues to annoy their fans with their new model, I should still consider it as a great platform for quick publishing.
Survey via Twitter to my 10k followers (https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/1148334055689031681).
Disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud - and I frequently post on Medium and elsewhere.
I'm wary of companies/products built entirely on top of other products - too much risk (see Zynga). Same concept with Medium.
- Post your personal stuff on your own domain.
- Post your Google Cloud stuff on the company blog.
- Syndicate / cross post to Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever etc. if one or both make sense for the topic.
- You don't need to cross post the whole post if the platform doesn’t warrant it (lots of eyeballs, but hostile to the content-publisher, i.e. Facebook). You can put 2 paragraphs and a link to "read more on xyzblog". You're mostly using these services for discovery. In general, treat platforms you don't control as discovery-only.
- Encourage and enable readers to subscribe and engage directly at the canonical location (if practical), and not on the edges, as long as that doesn’t create a poor experience for them.
- If you find that more people want to engage / or the conversation is higher-quality at one of the distribution points (say HackerNews, vs the comments section of your blog), then provide a link to there from the canonical location and encourage conversation there.
(edit: Formatting)
Some of the writers insist on using screenshots (!) of pieces of code, so I guess that user experience is not very high on their list of considerations.
https://medium.com/@greg.perry/a-design-pattern-for-flutter-...
For example: https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-configmaps-and-se...
In this example, I have a single gist with multiple files, but Medium can't display just a single file from that gist at a time (maybe things have changed, but I don't think so).
Medium's gist and code support in general is sub-par compared to other platforms IMO, but as a platform it does make it easy to create and share content that is also easily discoverable.
I'm probably going to start hosting the canonical post on my own domain and just use Medium to syndicate it.
https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-redux-toast-not...
I don’t know who’s to blame here but I already hate Medium with a passion and this is not helping.
I suppose you can always post to Medium you and somewhere else, unless that is a violation of Medium's terms of service. Then your basically turning yourself into someone who spams everywhere, not just Medium.
So I guess Medium is for creators and spammers. Am I missing something?
Turns out my audience would rather have me post on Medium than on my personal blog:
But posting within their paywall is generally a pretty good deal.
Medium gives you some small amount of revenue. $50 to $200 is common, but I've had several authors in publications I run make $3000 or more for a single article.
Medium also tries to promote the best articles to people who care about the topic you're writing on but who might not have any idea who you are. They do a pretty good job of this. New writers might get an audience of a few hundred readers they wouldn't get otherwise. Committed Medium authors seem to get audiences of a few thousand people for each article.
And the author isn't giving up much for those two benefits. They get to keep their copyright and could publish anywhere else. The article still qualifies for SEO even though it's behind a (metered) paywall. Authors have a "friend" link that bypasses the paywall altogether.
If you truly believed you were writing things that people will want to read, long form or not, you SHOULD be willing to invest in marketing yourself to promote your own site. At least enough to justify your "risk vs reward" balance.
Taking out a Facebook ad for your local area is not as expensive as you might think and I honestly believe the whole Google Ads and Facebook Ads have allowed the little guys to buy ads and distribute them to the specific target they want. The tools are there, what is lacking is the will and confidence to follow through.
There is a classic problem in content recommendations, what someone says they want vs what they actually click, good systems ( from 2008 ) do a blend, then start balancing.
I cancelled my 'open paywall' and will probably start a WordPress.
The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs.
For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes.
I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard. A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication.
The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.
He's basically going from freemium to a closed group of hardcore readers. I see two problems with that:
1. He obtained those hardcore readers via the freemium approach. What will he do about subscriber churn, rely on just word of mouth, or go back to freemium once in a while?
2. How long does the think the 10/month will last? It's fine now as few writers are doing it. But does he think he'll be able to charge 10/month when everyone else charges that much? No matter how rich you are, as a reader, there's a limit to how many subscriptions you're willing to pay.
Entering your credit card details into a generic payment system requires a significant level of trust which I may not be willing to extend to some blogger I hardly know.
Some people have very weird contractual structures in mind when they advertise "$10/month". They might mean: Yearly contractual term paid for on a monthly basis, but with a 3-month notice period, and contract renewing for another full year term if it doesn't get cancelled on time.
Sometimes it can be difficult to contact customer service (or anyone else willing to listen to you) when there's a problem with billing. Sometimes, cancellation can involve having to send a fax.
Sometimes they might sell your data to people who will spam you. etc. etc. etc.
For all of these reasons, the friction I experience when contemplating what is prima facie $10/month is significantly more than just that monetary value.
Here it seems to me that medium could play the role of that trusted counterparty (like amazon prime video) to make subscriptions frictionless. Or maybe someone should just do that as a generic paywall service for subscriptions. Or maybe that already exists, and I just don't know of it's existence yet (with the caveat, that, in this case, it doesn't really enjoy my trust at this point making it a bit pointless).
But this is 'easiest' only if you are of a dev\IT background.
It's based off of WriteFreely, the same blog platform that people.kernel.org just switched to. It's totally free to use, and I'll never put ads on it. It supports markdown and html posts, so code syntax highlighting and all that fun stuff is well supported. Give it a shot if that sounds good for you!
The website feels so much more bloated than a few years back . It is full of advertisements to other articles, weird share buttons and inconsistent layouting.
If the author chooses to congregate with other authors on a publisher's site, and pay them rent, their choice. So long as there's no paywall.