Is Medium good for blogging & worth it?

Hi, I’m Praneeth Kumar.

In this blog, you will learn whether it is medium good for blogging and worth it for writers or not.

I guarantee at the end of the blog, all of your queries and concerns regarding medium will be answered.

So without further ado let’s get started.

Here’s a 30000-foot view of the blog post.

What is Medium?

According to wiki, Medium is an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation.

Now let’s have a look at the benefits and drawbacks of medium.

Benefits & drawbacks of using medium for writers and blogging purpose;

Now let’s have a look at the benefits and drawbacks of using medium for your blogging journey and as a writer in general, we will first talk about the benefits and then talk about the drawbacks of using medium.

So without further ado let’s get started.

Benefits of medium:

Take a look at the top 10 benefits of using medium for Blogging and as a writer.

1. It is free.

Yes, You read it right.

Medium is a great blogging platform where you do not need to invest even a single penny to get started writing blog posts.

As a blogger and a content writer or a copywriter in general there are no premium subscription plans or higher plans that you need to buy in order to continue writing blogs.

There is no limit of storage and bandwidth for publishing content on medium unlike other free blogging platforms like wix and Weebly.

So, overall medium is a free blogging platform where you can publish unlimited number of posts without ever thinking and worrying of storage and bandwidth limits.

2. It is easy to set up and simple to start.

Another interesting thing about medium is that you can easily create an account and start publishing content instantly as soon as you create your account.

You don’t need to worry about all the technical stuff related to website setup like submitting a sitemap or improving the loading speed and security of your website.

If you just consider the medium as a blogging platform where,

there are so many features that medium platform provides to writers and bloggers for creating and publishing content on the platform like it is a WYSIWYG editor and, 

• Easily adding multimedia.
• Easily write content with the distraction free editor.
• Embed videos from YouTube.
• Easily highlight important sentences in your story on medium.
• Easily add relevant tags to your content to make your story easily visible for readers.

You can easily add and publish content to the medium by using the medium mobile app as well.

There are lots of SEO features that are available with medium as well like customizing the titles, meta description, URLs, subheadings, image alt tags, etc.

Overall medium is a great platform that is very easy to set up and it provides lots of features for blogging and creating content in general.

3. It is social media as well.

This is what makes medium a little different and unique, unlike other blogging platforms.

Apart from being a free blog platform like Wix and Weebly medium is also a social media platform which means

it has an already established audience of around 150 million people a month visiting and using the platform.

So, it is a great opportunity for content writers, copywriters, and bloggers to expose their work and skill to large audience.

As a blogger and writer, you don’t have to worry about getting traffic to your website if you publish content on medium because

there is already an audience who is present on the platform, it is like a social media platform.

They will find and read your stories.

Because the medium is also social media platform on the other side it offers lots of social media features like,

following the favorite authors, claps feature to different stories which are a form of like feature as we have in Facebook,

Easily share medium stories to other social media platforms online, Easy bookmark medium articles,

easily comment on medium articles and connect with the author, easily follow the author and receive updates of medium stories like Facebook notifications.

It is a perfect mixture of Facebook and WordPress.com, I would say.

So apart from being a free blogging platform medium is also one of the big social media platforms and is listed on the top list of social media platforms by buffer.

4. Highly authoritative website.

The interesting thing about medium is it has a domain authority of 98 which is a metric created by an SEO company called Moz,

although the domain authority metric does not influence a website’s ranking in Google it is a way to identify how authoritative a website is and it’s backlinks profile.

As per similar web more than 50% of the traffic to the medium comes from an organic search engine like Google.

Because the medium is such a highly authoritative website whatever blogs you publish on medium if they are targeted to any queries in general they are highly likely to rank in search engines because of the authority that medium has.

So it is a no-brainer to see so many medium articles ranking at top of search results for many search queries in Google.

This is a great opportunity for bloggers and content writers to publish blogs

as they have a great opportunity to be able to rank for keywords in top positions of Google faster than they could do with their website.

5. You can make money.

This is what actually attracts so many bloggers and writers to use the medium.

Look you don’t have to buy a premium subscription plan to be able to publish content on medium but you can earn money by simply publishing content on the platform.

In most cases you only make money through 2 methods by publishing content on medium,

• You can do affiliate Marketing on medium.
• The medium platform pays you  money.

You don’t need to buy a subscription plan to write content but

you definitely have to buy a premium subscription plan to be able to read medium articles every month which costs around $5 a month or $50 a year.

This is how medium makes money.

And depending upon how users and audience are interacting with your stories as a publisher on medium and the number of claps of your medium articles get,

you will get paid from the medium as a small percentage of the subscription plan that users purchase.

You got the point.

This is one of the great opportunities for many bloggers and content writers to publish content, grow their talents and earn money for absolutely free of cost.

6. Easy to connect to a custom domain.

Another interesting thing about medium is that if you don’t want to get your content published in the name of medium,

you can easily connect a custom domain name to get a medium account and create a new website on medium but associated with your domain name.

Other free blogging platforms like Wix and Weebly charge you money to be able to connect a custom domain name with your website, but medium gives it for free.

By being able to connect a custom domain with your medium account,

you will be able to build authority and backlinks to your own domain name, not for medium,

you can still publish unlimited posts on medium, and enjoy all the benefits of the medium.

You can also get access to to Google Analytics and search console tools with a custom domain for your free medium website.

Having a custom domain helps build credibility and in branding of your website.

Overall it’s a great deal for bloggers and writers.

7. It has high-quality traffic as a social media platform.

If you see medium just as a social media platform, it may not be the best social media platform in terms of numbers.

But, medium is still definitely a great platform because of its demographics of audience.

Look, majority of the traffic on medium comes from search engines, 

Unlike social media platforms, search engine traffic has a high conversion rate and usually, SEO traffic is of high quality.

Due to the popularity of medium as a social media platform but unlike other social media platforms,

where people mostly visit for entertainment purposes,

people use the medium to learn and educate themselves with different ideas and concepts and less for getting entertained and sharing memes, etc.

According to a similar web, Medium receives more than 25% of its total traffic percentage from the United States of America and huge chunk of traffic of medium comes from Western countries like countries from Europe North America, and South America.

According to a search engine journal, In April 2015, Native Advertising stated, regarding the demographics of Medium, that “95% of Medium’s readers are college graduates, and 43% of them earn six figures or more. Even better, from an advertiser standpoint, these readers are also young, with half of them in the coveted 18-34 demographic and 70% of them being under the age of 50.”

As a blogger and a marketer perspective it is great quality traffic that you can leverage for your business growth.

8. Easy to republish content.

Because of medium popularity, many bloggers and marketers use the medium to publish content from their websites and build authority, following, and personal brand online.

Even medium allows bloggers to publish their existing content from their website to the medium through special features like import tool and

medium gives Canonical tags feature for bloggers to avoid duplicate content issues.

• Learn more about duplicate content.

This is also a great opportunity to re-publish your existing content on medium without ever creating new content but you can double your traffic and exposure as a blogger and marketer through the medium.

9. Easy to export content.

Another thing about Medium is that you can easily export the entire content that you publish on Medium to your website like a backup.

This means that your content can be safe and secure, and

you can easily move your content from medium to other platforms like WordPress if you ever want to in the future.

This is a great benefit of using medium because other free blogging platforms like Wix and Weebly do not allow you to export content to your desktop like a backup because,

they are proprietary CMS and they don’t want users to move away to other platforms from them.

It becomes quite hard to export and migrate your website from this free blogging platform to others, but it is not such a case with Medium.

10. Inbuilt stats to check growth.

The last benefit of using medium is that we have inbuilt statistics and analytics features to check and analyse the growth of your articles that you published on medium.

There are lots of cool features you can find in the statistics like, 

• Total views and total reads.
• Total claps and fans of your stories.
• Total referred traffic.

In terms of data you can find through medium statistics it is relatively less compared to Google analytics and,

the problem is you cannot access Google Analytics data with a free medium account you will need to connect a custom domain with your medium account for this.

These are all the benefits of using medium for blogging and for writers.

Now let’s see the drawbacks or disadvantages of using medium for blogging and writers.

Drawbacks of medium:

Here are 5 drawbacks of using medium, let’s take a look at the drawbacks in detail.

1. You don’t own the platform.

This is the biggest disadvantage of using medium and other social media and free blogging platforms as well.

You don’t own the website that you create on medium.

You just have the ability to freely sign up, create an account and start publishing content that’s it.

You are just using the free service of medium and medium owns the platform, not you.

The problem with this thing is that, if you don’t properly follow the rules and regulations of the medium they can and will delete or terminate your account without giving you notice.

Just like other social media platforms, Medium is also very strict in its guidelines and rules.

You are restricted to what kind of content you produce and publish.

If not, you can lose all your content, followers and your entire account on which you worked over the years in a snap of finger.

2. Limited customizations.

Medium is known for content publishing and simplicity.

Because of which it does not really offer as many features for customization as you would have with other blogging platforms.

Yes, you can do a few things like changing colors, font, and customizing headers but you cannot change the way your website looks, the theme, and the layout of your website.

There are no plugins that you can install to customize your website.

You don’t have access to change the code of your medium account or many templates and themes to customize your blog.

3. Limited monetization.

This is also one of the drawbacks of using the medium for bloggers and writers.

Apart from Affiliate marketing, you can’t really monetize and earn money.

• You can’t run ads from third-party advertisers.
• You can’t publish sponsored content.
• You can’t sell things like ebooks on your website on medium.
• If you think of selling accounts with followers, like domain flipping, your account will be suspended.
• You can’t accept or receive donations.

So it is quite hard to make money from your medium blog.

4. Highly competitive platform.

Another disadvantage of medium is that it is a highly competitive platform for publishers and bloggers.

Because the medium is a social media platform and has high-quality traffic to it, many bloggers and digital marketers, and brands leverage the platform to their maximum capacity.

According to similar web, the average visit duration for the medium is around 1 minute 45 seconds and the bounce rate is 75 percentage, to the platform is quite competitive.

Because it is easy to read republish content on the medium from other websites, many bloggers use the medium.

There is Always competition for publishers to capture audience attention from other blogs on the platform.

5. Less control over traffic.

Although it is very easy to drive traffic to your content that is published on the medium it is hard to convert that traffic into leads and clients as,

Medium is also social media platform which is also a bad thing if you consider it especially for blogging because,

you cannot build that relationship with your audience and convert traffic into leads in the future like in less control I am referring to the following things,

• You cannot control the recommendations feature you get after every story gets published on your medium blog like read the next feature at the end of the medium story, the stories are not yours they are mostly of other articles from different authors.
• You cannot add a custom code or any unique call to action at the end of your blog to grab attention and convert traffic into leads for blogging.
• You cannot use email marketing software and popups to capture the leads.

Overall it is difficult to generate leads from the traffic that you get from the medium.

After reading through all the benefits and drawbacks of using the medium for blogging and writers, let’s come to a conclusion whether or not you should use the medium for blogging and writing or not in 2021.

Is Medium good for blogging?

I think the medium is definitely a good platform for blogging mainly as a secondary blog, not a primary blog.

But I would not recommend you to start medium as your primary blog because

just like other social media platforms medium can delete your account anytime if you do not follow the rules properly and

there are limited monetization and customization ability in the medium.

If you are a blogger and want to start and grow your blog and earn money through various ways,

the medium can only help you expose your work to more audiences and help you in the journey but it is not a viable option for the long term.

Is Medium worth it for writers?

I think the medium is definitely worth it for writers because of the fact that it has a pre-established audience base and

you can easily get started writing content on medium without investing money but you can earn money by just writing content which is a great deal for writers.

You don’t need to worry about the promotion aspect or worry about the technical issues of the website,

As a writer the only job you have is to write and publish content and the medium allows you to do that without any hassle.

It is perfectly fine if you don’t start a blog separately and make medium as your primary blog because blogging is a lot more than just writing and not all writers would like to start a blog of their own.

I understand that.

Perfect solution and alternative for medium for blogging;

There is a popular saying in English called Don’t put all your eggs in a single basket, diversify them.

This is exactly what I want you to do with medium for blogging.

I recommend bloggers to use the medium as a secondary blog but not a primary blog not only for bloggers but also for writers because there is always a risk of losing content in the medium.

You can easily start a blog on WordPress by investing money as low as 80$ in web hosting and domain name.

You can read my ultimate guide on how to start a blog on WordPress.

By having a blog on WordPress you completely control your website content and

you can customize the website and monetize your blog however you like which is the complete opposite to Blogging on medium.

After you publish content on WordPress you can import all the blogs to medium and

use Canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues and this way you can leverage both platforms and succeed with both blogging and as a writer on medium.

This is what I am doing and this is what the majority of bloggers and digital marketers do as well.

Now let’s conclude the blog post.

Ending remarks.

These are all the things you need to know about the medium as for blogging and writers.

Do comment down what you think about the medium blog and whether you are starting a blog on medium or not.

Share the blog if you have found it helpful.

Sharing is caring.

You can read similar blogs about the medium on my blog like,

• Blogger vs medium which is best and why.
• How to write a blog when you are not a writer?

I will catch you next time till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.