I have always been skeptical of Medium, its business model, and its future. Most of that skepticism can be blamed on my supremely bad experience working with digital media startups. When they go belly up, as so many do, you are left behind to manage the fallout and rescue your writing or publication, hoping to retain some of the readership and/or income you’d established. That only had to happen to me once before I pledged to own and control the digital ground I build on.
From the start, I saw Medium as a startup with lots and lots of investor cash but Panglossian goalsto revolutionize online writing, publishing, and journalism. I stayed far away and remained unconvinced by the vision of its hallowed tech-star leader. In this case, the tech star is Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter. Because of his status and reputation, he’s been able to lure all kinds of people to Medium over the last decade, sometimes to their detriment.
Now, in a development as inevitable as the sunrise, Williams has stepped down from his role as CEO just as Medium’s decline is more evident than ever. Spammy content has started infiltrating the platform, indicating either relaxed or nonexistent monitoring of who’s publishing and why. I’m now randomly getting tagged to ensure I see the latest rejuvenating health product being touted there.
Yet Williams still claims (while refusing to be interviewed about his exit), “To be clear, Medium’s story is far from over.” Don’t believe him. Medium’s last chapter has been written for a long while now. I could see the end coming as far back as 2016, when they reached out to me personally.
Somehow Medium had taken notice of my site (janefriedman.com) and how much traffic I receive. Their head of content development at the time wrote me, “We’re rolling out a variety of new ways to partner with successful bloggers like you.” The first suggestion was that I cross-post to Medium to increase the size of my audience. But even better, they said, would be migrating my entire operation to Medium, “which provides the benefit of layering the incredible content you’re already producing over Medium’s social and interactive features.” At that time, some really well-known publications had joined, including The Billfold, Media Decoded, and The Ringer.
When I asked how Medium would earn me money, I was told they were still “developing tools.” I explained I’d need to feel confident about the long-term economic benefit of making such a dramatic change. This statement led to a pitch call. Far from charming me, that conversation reduced my confidence to zero. Medium was not suited at all to my business model, nor did they seem to care. With a bit of hand-waving, they assured me the business part would work out. I politely declined the offer, and we never communicated again.
Unfortunately, a number of small publishers like me were taken in, partly because they didn’t like the headache of running, hosting, and maintaining their own websites and tech stacks. And at the time, Medium was lauded as having an amazing composition environment for writers alongside an elevated reading experience. Not to take anything away from Medium’s achievements in this area—they were remarkable, and now their UX is mimicked everywhere—but that’s not reason enough to migrate a media or content business.
In 2017, not long after I was solicited, Medium laid off a third of its staff because of poor results. As Williams announced their newest pivot, he wrote, “It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. We are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded based on the value they’re creating for people.” Medium shut down the publisher program (sorry, folks!), put up a leaky paywall, and started charging readers. And they started wooing writers with the potential for payment based on attention.
Medium has been successful at branding itself as a destination for writers who want to publish that occasional article or op-ed, and as a result, writers constantly ask my opinion on Medium. Usually they are already posting there and want reassurance they’re doing the right thing. Or they like how easy it all is, and they don’t want to start their own site or blog and then face the hard but necessary work of building an audience. Some clever writers have been able to extract money from Medium, but often it’s click-bait that wins the day. The large majority of writers will not see meaningful earnings.
So what’s the alternative to Medium? Substack has probably siphoned off the quality writers who once posted to Medium, and it’s a decent choice. Think of Substack as blogging with newsletter functionality thrown in—you can build a list while you blog. Substack has also ramped up its efforts to build a community and network that grants you some visibility you might not otherwise get on your own. While I wouldn’t join it for that reason, writers who worry about publishing into the void may feel better about Substack than, say, Ghost or WordPress.
Bottom line: Writers who have been using Medium to build a platform or readership will probably find themselves in a second-class landscape akin to Blogger. I consider Medium the road to nowhere for your writing career. If you are still publishing there or relying on it in any meaningful way, it’s time to leave and take with you whatever value you can find. For more on Medium’s sad history of business pivots, read Casey Newton’s piece, Ev Williams Gives Up.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
