First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages:
1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device.
2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write.
3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads.
4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further.
That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium.
Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.
Can you monetise the content at all? I assumed Medium was the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory - with the difference that unlike most, you can get some useful exposure from it, maybe.
Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.
Yeah - they've experimented with multiple monetization models over the past year or so. Now there is a beta for a select group of users. I for one really hope they nail it, but I'm not sure it's on the right path yet.
The challenge is that the platform of curation of interesting content for the sake of interesting content, stops working when it becomes the curation of interesting content for profit. As unless you do it based on customer satisfaction in microtransactions (oh I like your content have a cheese puff), then it's based on views or clicks.
Thus begins their decent into clickbait land where everyone gets cheesits (the crunchier, lamer and more disappointing brother of the cheese puff).
You earn low volumes of cash as you don't have a loyal readership. I earn disappointment as your title was misleading, and we both go home and cry in the fetal position at what the internet has become.
So, once again, hopefully they nail it - because right now they're pretty dandy.
> [Medium is] the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory
That's pretty much how all businesses try to get artists/creators to work for free ("it'll look great in your portfolio"). Medium has just found another way of doing that, it seems. Well played, Ev, well played.
First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages:
1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device.
2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write.
3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads.
4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further.
That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium.
Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.