I’ve been a big supporter of Medium for well over two years. Even when I wasn’t making much money, earnings decreased, and my audience started to slip away, I kept writing there. But I’m starting to get a little worried about it.
I have two Medium accounts - the account that is under my real name and an account under a pen name where I write…saucier content, shall we say? I’ve never hidden that fact. I pay for memberships on both of them because I think it is fair that if I want other members to read my content so I can earn from it, I should do the same. And I do read content of different types on each account. But I don’t read my own content on my other accounts.
Both accounts have earned money over the past two years, but lately, no matter what I seem to publish, views and reads (thus, earnings) are down. Not a little, but a lot. It doesn’t seem to matter if I put it in a big publication, one of my own publications, or just on my personal feed. The results don’t change a lot.
So, what are my options?
#1 Write on my blog first (republish to Medium)
By writing on my blog first, it will be my own personal space that gets all the search engine love. Google will see that the content was originally published on DaniSpace and will give it better ranking.
I’ll potentially earn money from Adsense.
By republishing on Medium, I can still earn money from my Medium followers.
I haven’t focused on a site that I own for publishing in a long time, so I think publishing there as the main place for people to find content would mean doing a little work on it. Adsense earnings are low at the moment so I may have to find another way to monetize it.
#2 Download all my Medium content so I can use it later
I have a lot of articles on Medium. Between the two accounts there are likely more than 500 pieces of content. Not all of them are worth saving. I’ll admit that. But much of it is. So, I need to get it all downloaded in case it disappears.
Medium is a pretty big publishing platform but I’ve seen bigger platforms disappear overnight.
#3 Stop relying on Medium’s email service and choose another one to stick with
I’ve used MailChimp in the past and it would be fine as long as I didn’t hit the upper limit for free. But I’m considering moving to Substack or another platform where I don’t have limits on the amount of subscribers or on how many emails I can send out.
I need to get all my email subscribers in one place and I need to back up my email list from other sources (like Medium) on a regular basis.
I want to mainly use email for free subscribers but I am considering also doing a paid subscriber option.
I’m becoming less and less comfortable with the idea of having all of my content exclusively on Medium and out of my control.
Have you thought about this? If you’re publishing on Medium, will you continue to publish exclusively on the platform or have you already begun the steps to transfer some or all of it somewhere else?
