Is Medium.com still relevant in 2023?

Blogging and creating quality content is an effective marketing strategy tool. This is a great additional way to promote your tech startup online. The question is how to choose a blog platform. The editors of teachwiki prepared a brief overview of the Medium platform and tried to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the project.

Today, many IT companies maintain corporate blogs. It’s easy to explain: content is the basis of expert online promotion. Blogging can be a great additional marketing strategy tool for a tech startup. This is another way to productively communicate with your target audience, show your expertise in a niche, present your product and introduce your services. Wix, Gator, WordPress, Tumblr, Squarespace and many other platforms allow you to create author blogs. Today we will look at the main characteristics of the Medium platform , its advantages and disadvantages.

Medium.com Explained

Before evaluating the intricacies, advantages and disadvantages of the Medium platform, it is worth first understanding how it is structured and how it works. Essentially, Medium is an online publishing house that promotes social journalism. In such a media model, any author can publish on an equal basis with professional journalists. The main thing here is to find your voice and interest the reader. By the way, about readers. The platform does not publish official statistics on the number of users of paid accounts, but they estimate their readership at 170 million.

How does medium.com work?

Medium is a platform where you can host and maintain your blog. This is done by professional journalists, authors and companies. This media model is not new at all, and it is often compared to Twitter and WordPress - the only difference is that Medium has very high standards for the quality of content posted. Here you can find blogs on completely different topics from politics and health to pop culture and technology.

An interesting feature of the platform is that you can make money here. If you become a member of their affiliate program, you can earn money from your publications (called “stories” here) based on how much time your subscribers spend reading them.

At various times, big-name authors—politicians, entrepreneurs, writers, and journalists—have published on Medium. Formats include both small personal notes and photo reports, and voluminous longreads and even journalistic investigations. The platform also allows you to communicate with your audience, send and receive messages and reactions from readers.

Like any other online content creation project, Medium has both its advantages and disadvantages. Let's take a closer look at them.

Why use Medium.com?

Huge readership

By registering on Medium, users join an impressive community of writers. For example, by blogging on the platform, a tech startup can get noticed by investors, tech journalists, influential bloggers, and potential clients. There is also a function to synchronize your blog with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This allows you to start your blog with an existing audience. You can use up to 5 tags per post. When readers react to a post, Medium's algorithm shares those reactions with users who follow those tags—a great opportunity to continually grow your audience.

Medium.com is easy

Registration on the platform is quick and easy. The interface is minimalistic and intuitive. There is no variety in design and personification of stories, but many note this solely as an advantage - there is no need to waste time choosing themes and design. The text editor is convenient for creating stories. The content is important here, not the outer shell. With just one click, you can insert a YouTube video, photo, graphic, or other Medium story into your post.

Content Management

Medium can be easily used as a content management system. Using the platform is intuitive and there are no hundreds of editing options, so stories are easy to read. Subscribers can highlight and comment on certain quotes, and a special algorithm reports the approximate time it will take to read the text to the end. And although there is the ability to connect to some (limited) Google analytics capabilities, reports are created based on three parameters: viewed, read, and recommendations.

More followers on social networks

Medium can be used as an additional tool in your marketing strategy. Twitter and Facebook are used to build their initial audience. But after that, Medium can help you find new subscribers in these networks. In the story caption, in the "About the Author" section, you can use links to profiles on all leading social networks - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, as well as to the website. All you need to do is create content that resonates.

Automated SEO Tools: Advantage or Disadvantage?

Medium provides basic SEO tools. As a home for top content, the platform has an excellent reputation among search engines. Built-in tools allow you to customize URLs (though not completely) and story descriptions, but they can also do this for the author. In other words, if you skillfully use SEO keywords in your texts, then Medium will do the rest. However, everything is not so simple here. Many criticize the platform precisely for this parameter, since successfully optimized texts attract traffic, in fact, to the platform itself, and not to the company’s personal website. More details about this can be found in the analysis of the project’s shortcomings.

Why is Medium.com criticized?

Who ultimately owns the content?

One of the main criticisms of Medium is that the content is not entirely owned by the bloggers. The thing is, by creating a blog on the platform, authors are technically creating new Medium pages. This means that the author’s blog does not belong to the author in the generally accepted sense, and all the traffic attracted by the content works to promote, first of all, the platform itself, and not the company’s website. You need to understand: if a platform is visited by millions of readers a day, this does not guarantee that these same millions will visit a specific blog of a new startup. Many critics also note that if Medium ceases to exist for any reason, all content and all subscribers will disappear along with it.

Algorithm

Medium has its own algorithm that allows readers to see certain content. And it does not work according to the basic rule of blogging, according to which the latest publications are always at the top. The platform's internal algorithm gives preference to high-quality content. This is generally good for readers, but for authors it means that their target audience may not see their materials at all.

Branding

Those who have already created their own brand need to think carefully about this point. If a company or startup already has its own logos and style, it's worth remembering that the blog page will always have Medium logos and internal platform links that cannot be changed. This may well confuse the reader, not to mention the fact that internal links will lead him to the platform's home page, where he will be offered dozens of stories on the same topic.

How free is this for the reader?

We must also remember that Medium is not completely free for readers. You still need to pay to access certain types of content and advanced features. And although it is possible to create completely free content that is available to all users, by and large this is a rather serious drawback that limits the target audience.

Today there are many platforms for creating a blog. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Blogging has already become an integral part of the activities of many companies. teachwiki would like to remind you that no matter what platform you choose for your tech startup blog, it is important that all content is written and reviewed by professionals. This applies to any type of content - whether you write cases and expert articles or create descriptions of a product. teachwiki's experienced IT writers work under the guidance of an expert developer to achieve the highest quality content. Here you can read tips on how to write expert texts correctly, and what mistakes beginners in IT copywriting make.