I’m seeing a trend where bloggers seem to be moving over to Medium.com rather than looking after their own websites.
From my own personal reading list, the team at Basecamp have done it, they no longer run their blog Signal versus Noise on their own servers.
Is is time to abandon the good ship WordPress and take sail with Medium? Psst I’ll save you some reading the answer is no.
What Is Medium.com
Medium.com is a publishing platform. It allows you to publish blog posts. It is aimed at thought provoking long form pieces
Medium is a startup without a monetization policy at the moment, no ads, no paid subscriptions, but they will have to start making money eventually and my guess would be a subscription of some sort to publish content to their large audience.
Medium is free at the moment
The Benefits Of Medium
Medium has lots of reader – If you publish there you are using their readers and platform to get more readers for your message. It’s easier to get lots of eyeballs on your message where there us already a large audience.
No tech skills – Medium doesn’t require any programming, hosting or setup skills. It just works.
What It Is Not
It’s not yours – you could be kicked off and lose control of your content at any time
It’s only a publication platform – all you get to do is add your content, no control over sidebars, links, widgets or anything else. No e-commerce, no email signups, no contact forms.
Tending Other Peoples Gardens
Yet again we see the rise of a third party site people don’t own and have not control over and people are telling us to abandon our own sites to rush and build someone elses.
Facebook, twitter, instagram, foursquare, wordpress.com and now medium, you are putting content on there so other people can monetise your work.
Use Medium as it is meant, put some pillar content onto Medium and use it to draw people to a web property you own.
Wrap Up – Medium.Com
I’m sure you are thinking it’s sour grapes that a WordPress developer would talk down Medium, but please remember they are a business, a business that wants you to create content for them (for free) so they can monetise your writing at a later stage.
It’s not a complete publishing platform like WordPress, you cannot extend their site to do any of the useful things you need.
Use their readers to promote your main site but don’t treat medium as your main platform. I’ll be publishing on Medium with my next post as an experiment.