Javier Sandoval on The Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Join Medium:
People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear them. They want the limelight and attention. Medium’s collaborative focus can help with exposure, but by making writing communal, the attention leaves the independent writer.
Without knowing, Medium may be stripping away the main reason people blog.
So, Medium clearly isn’t an individual-centric blogging platform. Writer accounts are nominally linked to Twitter profiles, but that relationship isn’t transparent to readers: there’s currently no way to follow writers on Medium.
Instead, Medium’s focus is on delivering the best content to readers, no matter who wrote it. That’s Evan William’s take on the modern web magazine, except unlike most other magazines, the majority of Medium contributors are unpaid.It’s worth noting that Medium has recently begun to partner with professional writers, paying them competitive freelance rates, but this mostly seems to be aimed at seeding Medium with high quality content, to attract other quality writers.
So what’s the incentive to put your writing on Medium, if you’re not getting money or followers? Well, as Sandoval points out, the tradeoff is exposure.
Significantly, if you don’t already have a large social media following, Medium could also potentially help you reach a much larger audience. And since you can put any text you like in a Medium post, some writers are already appending biographical footers to their posts, with links to social media and content they want to promote.I’ve even seen pull quotes used as text advertisements.
A better question to ask: what will happen when Medium is eventually monetised? Advertising seems likely, and while ads will interfere with Medium’s clean, minimalist design, they probably won’t greatly reduce reader numbers. Medium could potentially move to a subscription model, but that seems at odds with Medium’s emphasis on freely moving from one good piece to the next.
So, at least for now, Medium looks like a great way to get more eyeballs on high quality content. Personally, I’m going to be experimenting with cross-posting some of my blog posts on Medium.Of course, additional footnotes like this one will only appear on this blog.Medium doesn’t currently support footnotes. I’ll let you know how that goes.
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