Moving deeper into this internet age, people are increasingly becoming interested in what information is available to them on the internet. Things like life hacks, educational tips, entrepreneurship advice, and even culinary help are part of what people refer to the internet for. Information like this is available through blogs.
An estimate shows that over 409 million people open over 20 billion pages. With these figures, getting your content to matter is quite the competition. Without good quality content, readers would only skim through your blog posts. To what end? You find that you barely succeed in passing the message across. Therefore, this article will review a blogging host that ensures you deliver captivating and quality content to readers. First let us consider the backstory of this blogging platform, Medium.
The Origin Story of Medium
Medium was founded by America’s Evans Clark Williams in the year 2012. What was the aim behind this project? Medium as a blog host was developed to serve as a platform where bloggers could freely express themselves. However, it had to be done in more than merely 140 words as it was available on Twitter at the time. Over the time leading to May 2017, Medium could boast 60 million unique readers every month. As of 2017, Medium adjusted its payment scheme. Rather than pay several retained workers, a paywall scheme was put in place.
With this change, authors on Medium get paid in line with how much likes their content receives. They took into account not only likes but also the time spent on their content. Now, Medium has grown into something much better with Embedly, its content integration service provider. Glose, the social e-book platform was another valuable addition to Medium in 2021.
Key Features of Medium
The what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) interface makes it easier to publish quality content. With this interface, authors get to see what their article would look like when published before it is complete.
Ease of customizing and publicizing: Medium makes your experience as a blogger enjoyable. Incorporating some features from other platforms users love makes it give authors a more comprehensive work site. For instance, bloggers’ entries can be shared as seen on Twitter. Also, you can assign a unique theme to a post of yours as seen on Tumblr. Lastly, readers can up vote your posts almost as they do on Reddit.
Following the paywall scheme, Medium introduced the clap feature in 2017. In place of the recommend button, readers can now click on the clap button several times. The amount of claps they give the post signifies the extent to which they love its contents. Medium considers this in determining the payment its authors receive.
Membership Deals: Medium grants its users a subscription plan of $5 per month. If you would like to pay at once, a $50 per year plan is also available.
The Tag system: On this blogging platform, content is sorted by topic. With the tag system, the best articles according to claps left on posts by readers are put into categories.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Medium has a beginner-friendly layout. You need not worry about what page to visit to get started. This is because the option to get started is among the first things you come across on the landing page of Medium.
The WYSIWYG interface alongside other formatting options ensures that the content you put out there on the platform is nothing short of top quality. You can also add media files by importing from other platforms then publish your blog in record time.
Membership on Medium comes with several benefits. These include audio narrations of best-selling stories, an advanced bookmark section, and access to the members-only content.
Convenience in signing up: Can sign up for a blogging platform be as versatile as on Medium? The developers of this platform have made sign-up so convenient. You could either sign up using your account on Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Signing up with Twitter makes it possible for the platform to import your followers on Twitter. Although, this action is a one-time thing. If you want to sign up through the Medium app, you could use your email address instead.
A perk of being a partner on Medium is that you get paid according to your contributions. The paywall scheme applies to Medium partners. Partners get paid in line with how much attention their post draws. Also, Medium gives the partners whose contents get the most read a share of the subscription fees of members every month.
Medium makes it easy for you to select a blog post to read. On the landing page of Medium, you find categories of blogs to select from. In addition to this, the approximate time it would take to finish reading each blog is on display.
As on social media, you can gain your audience out of the over 60 million Medium readers. The follow button on Medium makes room for this.
Just as you add tags to an Instagram post, Medium allows you to add a maximum of 5 tags. With relevant tags, the platform crawls your content up when users would like to read content in that category. If you have an eye-catching title, you can imagine how many clicks your blog post would get. And with good content, you could get just as many reads.
Cons
Whatever you post on Medium remains on Medium. Therefore, if anything were to go wrong with Medium, you would lose your content and everything you have built on the platform.
The only means of monetization on Medium is available with its partnership deal. The partnership program alerts you when your article is not at a money-eligible level. It also provides the option to make it money-eligible. Only then do you make profit through the partnership.
Using the platform's algorithm and tag system, posts at the top of the list are not necessarily the most recent. They are the people's choice. Hence, if a post has had the time to gather enough claps, that's what you'll find at the top.
FAQs
What happens when I open a Medium account and then sign in with a different account?
If you have an existing account on the platform, signing up with a different email address, or Facebook/Google account would be opening a new account. It would leave you with a new account with no connections with the former one.
Can I link my Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts to Medium?
Yes, you can. If all these accounts share the same verified email address as your Medium account, the platform automatically connects these amounts. In this way, you can log into the account using either of their login details. You can find the option to connect all options in the settings.
Can I break the connection between my accounts across social platforms and Medium?
The linking action stated above is reversible. You would also find the option to disconnect all social networks. It is worthy of note that this action does not take your list of followers gained so far. All it implies is that henceforth, you would log in using your email address.
Wrapping Up
Medium’s clap feature allows you to get an approximate value of how many readers have seen your post. To get a clap, users have to be content with the entire content you put up. In other words, each clap gives an estimate of how many readers read and liked your post. Such statistics as these let you know areas of your blog to work on- be it a catchy title or relevant tags. With Medium, you need nothing more than an account to get started and explore Medium with its community of over 60 million readers. If you need help getting an idea of what to write on, Medium also got you covered. The millions of already published articles are a great place to start. Indeed, Medium is “Where good ideas find you”.