In the past I’d written a handful of blog posts on Medium. Mostly because their editor is great — it gets out of your way and makes it easy to just get to writing. The aesthetic is very legible, and you don’t have to worry about administering a server, so what’s not to love?
I had a plan for a series of new blog posts (which will be coming over the next several weeks), and actually wrote most of the content and had everything staged. Then I realized something fatal to my plan: Medium’s revenue model. I am not a voracious consumer of other content on Medium, so maybe it’s always been like this. But while in years past I’d noticed that there were some set of stories that seemed to be “premium content” (they’d only let you read a few per month for free without a subscription), I realized now that this applies to all posts on Medium. You can only read 3 articles on Medium a month before you need to pay for a subscription. Has it always been this way? Or was that a recent change? Either way…
Fuck. That.
I just wanted to easily blog. Given sites like blogger, tumblr, livejournal, etc., the internet has a history of free blogging platforms, and I had assumed that Medium was going to follow suit, and find some other way to make money (ads? premium content articles? I realize it’s not straightforward, but whatever, not really my problem to solve right here). The idea of (a) them directly monetizing things I write and (b) the fact that if I release just one blog post a week, people would need to subscribe to their service to keep up, makes the whole thing a non-starter.
Not that I expect to go viral any time soon, but there’s no way anyone is going to read my ramblings with hurdles like that. Fortunately, I already had a server running for other purposes, and between that and dusting off some very rusty httpd sysadmin skills, now I’ve got this blog up and running, with the content and access fully under my own control.
On a not-unrelated note, WordPress has improved substantially since I last tinkered with it. This editor ain’t half-bad either.
The few posts I had on Medium, I’m going to migrate here. New ones to come here too. Watch this space for more.
Surprising news.. I feel like I read 4x medium articles on Tuesday alone without seeing a paywall
Honestly I may have confused myself, since I feel like with modest usage just on the authorship side, I’m getting increasingly pushy CTA boxes to sign up for membership. I don’t feel like it’s very clear as to what counts as a soft-paywall hit vs what’s free. I have definitely followed a handful of links to medium articles that I couldn’t read and may have extrapolated about what percentage of the site the paywall covers?
Also when fiddling with per-article settings before publishing, there’s an entry in the settings page about creating “friend links” to articles, where it reassures me that handing out my “friend link” to others ensures they won’t be blocked from reading my article by the paywall–which implies that my content *could* be paywalled, even if it isn’t.
So, I may have overreacted to a misunderstanding. 🙂 That said I actually feel pretty good about less reliance on someone else’s [maybe-]walled garden. So, thanks for the push, Medium growth hackers?