Medium and Substack
Re: the Medium blog comparing the two
Medium recently published an argument for why writers without a large external audience should pick Medium over Substack. I fall into the “limited external audience” category, and I’m but a wee little blog, so I thought I’d write up my take on it.
It’s comfortably outside the blog’s normal focus on economics and statistics, but I’m a card-carrying member of the economics cult. So, I have to shoehorn it into everything.
Clearly, by revealed preference (see? I did it already), I agree with the conclusion of the post. I’m writing this on Medium.
But there’s one part of the post that people who start writing here should at least know is unlikely to hold true for them.
Re: “Write on Medium if you don’t have an existing audience”
I disagree with the post’s suggestion that you can just start writing on Medium and people will read it, i.e., that discovery on Medium will get you reads, even without an audience or trying to promote the blog.
Discovery on Medium is a multiplier. If you get a sufficient number of reads from some other source, then you’ll start getting discovery on top of what you can bring in — which is great! — but it’s not like you can hit publish and get any real exposure.
I’d prefer data from more diverse sources, but I only have one dataset to go off of: my own. And, as always, you go to the Data War with the Data Army you have.
I’ve written a couple blogs that I didn’t share on my LinkedIn for whatever reason. The total reads from those blogs are less than 20 — cumulative. One of the posts was in January 2025 where I had about 2300 reads in total. Maybe that gives a sense of how little action you’ll get on a post unless you have some alternative way of telling people about it.
Most of the great blogs on Medium I’ve found via LinkedIn posts, not on-site discovery.
[I think part of this is caused by Medium having these omnibus publications with limited editorial input. It’s the natural outcome of the market, of course. Getting more blogs improves the publication’s chances, and there’s basically no downside to including a weak blog in the pub. These posts flood the discovery feeds, and you can’t follow a pub for its good posts without getting spammed by its bad posts. Publications with editorial input could solve this problem by providing more of a filter — and a meaningful stamp of approval — but that’s not what the product encourages.]
You aren’t going to get readers from Medium’s discovery without first getting a seed amount of readers from elsewhere [probably? There’s one of everything]. So, I don’t think this is a great reason to choose Medium over Substack. You have to acquire the audience either way, and Substack also has discovery mechanisms.
So, why do you use Medium?
It has a nice, easy “follow” button for people to get notifications about my new posts. People don’t have to click a lot of buttons or give extra info. They can just follow. Substack feels more like I’m being moved through a conversion funnel. There are buttons saying “Subscribe now!”, e-mail addresses to enter, etc.
I don’t want to “monetize.” I want an experience that minimizes the friction to reading. So, I don’t want landing pages covering the post asking for e-mails, etc.
(My take: Direct monetization is a silly strategy for blogs about career stuff. Any direct money you might earn will be minuscule compared to the Right People seeing the post. You want to maximize the probability they see it, not try to make a hundred dollars by paywalling it.)
The SEO is strong if a post does well, too. I only have one post that’s done well enough to get picked up by search engines — In Defense of Statistical Significance — but that’s kind of neat to see.
It’s an easy writing experience. A couple clicks to get a landing photo from Unsplash. Simple to use. I don’t have to set anything up to start writing. People can comment easily. What’s not to like?
Ads
Of course, I know nothing about Medium’s traffic patterns to have a sense of whether it has the scale to work business-wise, but will that stop me from commenting on its business strategy? This is the Internet. Of course not. I don’t need “data” to drop a hot take.
On Medium I’d prefer the ads model, I think, without any direct monetization for bloggers. I think the vision the CEO put forward in this post is a good one: Making a site for people who aren’t “content creators.”
People who aren’t [aspiring] “content creators” aren’t looking to make money from writing blogs.
(I’m never going to stop scare-quoting that phrase — “content creator” — because it sounds alien — bizarre. A person makes a series of images shown in rapid succession to imitate movement, but we’re too embarrassed to call it a movie, a film, or a flick. So, we searched for a word to describe the Thing, and found one neutral, bland, and beige enough that it can refer to what’s inside a cardboard box, my stomach, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.).
So long as the revenue is via Premium subscriptions (I’m a subscriber!), there has to be a reason to make Premium posts, so you have to pay bloggers, and you’ll get the “hustle” types that try to hack Medium’s algo in some way to make a little dough. So, I think it’d be neat to move away from that.
In Conclusion…
Anyway, that’s my take. It’s definitely outside the normal topics I write about. There wasn’t a single equation!
But, as the post said, Medium is a good place to write outside your niche. I’m proving out the theory.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn
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