I Was Wrong About Medium

Today, I have to admit that I was wrong about Medium. A few weeks ago, I published a post on Medium to say bye-bye^1,2. I was there at the beginning of this publishing platform and published quite a few articles. But I didn’t like the monetization of Medium over time. I realized my stand on this wasn’t fair. Let me explain.

Medium has what they call a partner program where writers can get money for their content. If people like what they read, they will read articles up to the very end and even “clap” their virtual hands to show their appreciation. This is the way we, the author, get paid. I decided to try it myself and enter this program (I’m also a paying member now). On my WordPress blog, I did something different where I created a tip jar so my readers could tip me. I’m still waiting for my first tips, by the way.

As Medium writes on their partner program help page:

You’re rewarded by readers, not advertisers

And to me, this is a big plus because it means that there are better ways to monetize a service or content than by depending on ad-related content.

This is about reaching out

I won’t quit WordPress. I just want to make my feature posts available on Medium, too, for my 575 readers over there. This is way more than my mere 77 followers on WordPress. So, this is about reaching more people. After all, why write for a few when many more could benefit? Plus, I learned that I could cross-publish from WordPress via a plugin. Even better, I can use my favourite writing tool, Ulysses, to post directly to Medium. How cool is that!

My goal is to publish my longer pieces on a WordPress blog first, then on Medium.  Link posts, photos, and short posts are still going to be only available on my own blog.

Medium’s unique features

As a writer on WordPress and Medium, I can compare both services. Medium was created long after WordPress, and they took a refreshing approach at the time. The text editing experience is cleaner and more focused than on WordPress. Since then, WordPress did redesign its editor, but Medium is still offering a better experience, in my opinion. The platform was and still is much simpler to manage. In fact, there are very few things to manage on Medium. Plus, there are a few unique features on Medium on the reading experience side. Readers can “clap” their virtual hands to show appreciation and can highlight part of the text or write comments directly on the article too. The following screenshot of my Medium profile shows exactly that: a few of my past highlights. It is a great way to document interesting things over time.

So check this space for more in the near future. You will find a few articles published from 2015 to 2017 about the Apple ecosystem that you won’t find on my Numeric Citizen blog. This period is when I wasn’t actively on WordPress. So, please, take a moment to check them out!

1. I deleted my post since then. Don’t try to find it! 🙂  ↩
2. I didn’t close my account. It was left in read-only mode.  ↩