Michael Brooks

Medium bloggers are all the same now

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Medium used to be a decent place to read articles

I feel like Medium had a good variety of bloggers at one point. I could get some financial advice, maybe some world news and a heap of self-help articles. I also used it for tech and programming, and it was a great place for a variety of topics.

Somehow, this has all changed

There seems to be a lot of bloggers moving away. Some have started a newsletter with Substack, others have their own self-hosted blogs or moved to Ghost. But those that stayed all seem to talk about very similar topics.

It’s now full of Crypto bros, Web3 and making money. I get it. Medium was meant to be a great place to earn money, because you would gain a portion of money from members. This spurred on a lot of excitement, and made people talk about it. However, this talk hasn’t stopped and the only people left on Medium are the ones still talking about it.

Also, they talk about how the platform will grow again, and “this time, it will be different”. But I think Medium’s time has passed, and they can’t come back from their misdirection. They can try, and it will probably host a handful of bloggers for a while. I expect it will end up like Flickr (which still exists) or Vimeo.

It will chug along with minimal ups and downs, keeping a fairly consistent line over time. This isn’t bad, but for the company, this isn’t good either. They were all about growth and supporting their creators, and if the creators can’t earn more through more readers and followers, they will either give up, or go elsewhere like many before them.

Medium needs to change, but it’s probably too late

Like I say, they need to change, but it’s probably already too late. The CEOs change more than the seasons. They all come in with promises and high hopes and fail to make bring in more writers and readers.

What are your thoughts?

Are you a Medium writer or reader? What are your thoughts on Medium as a blogging platform? I still think WordPress is one of the best places to write as the community is great, and you have greater choice of where you can distribute your content.

Michael Brooks | Website Developer/Blogger

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4 responses to “Medium bloggers are all the same now”

  1. Hilary Tan avatar
    Hilary Tan

    This is a great article. The WP reader wouldn’t let me read the whole thing, so I had to visit your blog in order to access the article. But I digress…

    I recently joined Medium in May 2022 and I can be found @sereneluna. I noticed that there’s an influx of articles about crypto, computer programming, and other topics that don’t interest me at all (yawn). As for making money, most of those articles are behind paywalls but I see what you’re saying about the lack of originality. Call me a hypocrite for putting my articles behind a paywall, but I refuse to get a Medium subscription. Why? The amount of money I make on Medium is pocket change, and I would break even on a good month if I were to pay the $6/month fee. Since I’m Canadian, it’s more expensive plus Medium takes -30% of my earnings. To me, it doesn’t sound fair. As for other platforms like Flickr, I used to use Flickr. It used to be good. Photo storage used to be unlimited, until they started charging a monthly fee. Then I couldn’t access the photos I had stored on Flickr and ended up paying a pretty penny just to access those photos and move them elsewhere. Overall, I still think Medium is a good site because there’s potential to earn money, so I rather stick it out until I find something better. I see more pros to using Medium than cons.

    Reply
    1. Michael Brooks | Website Developer/Blogger avatar
      Michael Brooks | Website Developer/Blogger

      It’s definitely a great place for writers to make some money from their efforts and Medium receives top marks for that. Unfortunately, because of the points I made, I feel like it’s not a good experience for readers which are the people they need to attract. There are ways (including browser plugins) to get around the paywalls which is a good thing for those who don’t want to pay, but bad for Medium and their writers. There’s a lot of things that Medium need to fix, and I do hope they can fix it for everyone’s sake. Best of luck in your Medium writing efforts, and I will give you a follow. ☺

      Reply
      1. Hilary Tan avatar
        Hilary Tan

        Hi Michael! Thank you for following me on Medium. I followed you back – it is true that we need all the support we can get. So far, my experience on Medium has been really good. It’s too bad that Medium isn’t attracting the right kind of people these days, and that people are moving elsewhere. I do my best to link my blog to Medium and add articles to Medium publications, which helps to an extent….

        I’m guilty of using the chrome extensions to get past the paywall but the one I was using was a real pain. In order to really take advantage of adding comments & read articles at the same time, I would have to use 2 different browsers. There’s another way around the paywall under the chrome settings (disable Java script) but then several other sites won’t work. I really don’t want to pay until I’m able to earn enough to pay for blogging expenses and a Medium subscription. Ideally, I want to know if Medium is just a phase (shiny object syndrome) or something I can chip away at long-term. I agree that Medium could be better (for one thing it’s a pain to navigate and not the most user-friendly) but I guess the same could be said about WP. There’s a lot of things WP could improve as well. I have yet to find a perfect blogging platform lol

  2. Renard Moreau avatar
    Renard Moreau

    🙂 As you have rightly stated, “WordPress is one of the best places to write as the community is great, and you have greater choice of where you can distribute your content.”

    Substack seems to be the place where serious-minded writers are heading to.

    Medium is not as appealing as it once was.

    Reply

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