1,095 karma · joined February 24, 2015
With that said, I think there's still a healthy ecosystem of similar products. There was a post on the front page about a new newsletter that sent out one "classic" HN post a week, I think the article mentioned it was doing pretty well. Can't remember its name though haha.
With that said, I've never had as much luck with native Medium traffic as much as on my first post, so I've since had to become much more clever at finding readers. Once you know how to properly distribute longform content, platform becomes less important.
I'll continue to use Medium though, because the design is incredible, the writing experience (but not the editing experience!) is a pleasure, and there's always a small, reliable amount of native traffic I'll get from Medium readers. And to me, the opportunity that a piece might go "Medium viral" is way more valuable than the downside of not being able to plaster my posts with popups.
The first blog post I wrote on Medium [0] got there by accident: I planned on publishing it on a popular local blog. While I'd used WordPress before, I didn't have a personal blog, so I wrote everything in Microsoft Word.
The piece contained a lot of images—so many that Word kept crashing. The deadline was approaching, so I decided to finish things in Medium and sent the link to my editor. (I probably could have used Google Docs, too.)
When it came time to publication—keep in mind, the editor and I hadn't signed any exclusivity agreements—the editor had not only published my piece with uninvited edits, but the image formating on their website was super unappealing. I decided that when promoting my piece, I'd link to my Medium version instead, since it looked better, didn't contain the edits, and the Medium.com URL carried no less weight than a URL from RandomMontrealPublication.com.
My hunch was correct. The Medium piece outperformed the piece on the "popular" Montreal blog I submitted to (it still did pretty well there, despite the editorial team not doing a great job of pushing it themselves). When local press began to pickup the story, all of the backlinks were going to the Medium version, rather than the RandomMTL version. One of the reasons it did so well on Medium was that it was selected as a Staff Pick (which put it in the newsfeeds for all users, as well as a newsletter sent to all users). For a first-time writer, the attention that Medium was able generate for me (a complete unknown!!) was super, super addicting.
Fast forward a month. My popular Medium piece lands me a job at a local startup as a copywriter, where among other things, I'm tasked with reviving the company's blog. Big surprise: the team has been swamped building their app, so the made-in-house blog is a bit dated. I convince them to try Medium, arguing that it has a native audience that can send us traffic.
While the "content marketing" I write for them never gets a Staff Pick endorsement (nor the corresponding Medium user traffic surge), it does get some pickup among the Medium community, including an Economist editor who emails us and references my piece in a story [1][2] and a Quartz editor who asks to syndicate it [3].
Eventually I get approached by a second startup (also in Montreal), who've seen my pieces on Medium. They have three writers on staff who have all published Medium #1 stories and we all continue to use Medium as a way to republish stuff from our blog (for traffic), and as an alternative to press release PDFs when pitching press (because they look good). Moreover, if there's anything we write that doesn't fit on our blog (like my last post, "The 50 Best HackerNews posts of all time" [4]), we can skip our blog and publish on Medium instead.
TL;DR: Writing on Medium gives you access to a big audience, which is great if you don't have a blog or if nobody reads your blog. Moreover, even if you have a vibrant blog, posting on Medium can give your pieces a second wind. It doesn't hurt that writing in Medium is a genuine pleasure. Compared to its competitors (Google Docs/Tumblr/Word/etc.) writing on Medium is like upgrading from a quill to a fountain pen.
While I've never managed to get another Medium Staff Pick, I always get a little traffic from Medium. My HN post from last week got 55k hits (many from HN) and Medium sent me ~2k of that. My latest post also talks a little about why readers trust the Medium.com URL, which may be another reason writers might gravitate to the site. [4]
[0] https://medium.com/@bagelboy/the-rise-and-fall-of-fairmountb...
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/2166421...
[2] https://medium.com/@transitapp/hello-nairobi-cc27bb5a73b7
[3] http://qz.com/357685/engineering-a-mass-transit-app-for-a-ci...
[4] https://medium.com/swlh/best-of-2015-pfffffffft-79d9b014f4de
I wonder if this approach to iterative building is applicable to other fields. You can iterate on a plane or a website, even a stand-up comedy routine. But what about a novel? Or song?
I know that HackerNews is heavily weighted towards news (and not old, timeless content), but I wanted to see if certain stories have nevertheless been "canonized" on the site. As it turns out, there are a select few (~3500) that have been resubmitted twice or more to HN. Those numbers are obviously biased against recent stories, which have not had enough time to reappear on the site.
I also compared submission domains to see who was posting the most "resubmitted" content. As it turns out, independent bloggers like PG and Matt Might outperform mass media outlets like TechCrunch and Bloomberg in the number of stories that have been submitted 2+ times to HN.
While the data analysis isn't perfect (we didn't account for subdomain usage [bits.blogs.nytimes.com vs nytimes.com], and if URLs had weird parameters appended to the end, we didn't count them as duplicates). Nevertheless, some really cool insights from a week's worth of work.
As a bonus, the stories that made our list are absolutely incredible. Definitely check them out.