Has Medium Culled Reach/Lost Value?

[Steve Brownlie]

I never was super active on Medium but whenever I did post it used to get between a few hundred and a few thousand views without me doing much of anything.

Recently checking it out again with a view to posting occasionally for a new project came across all the new stuff (metered paywall etc) where if you don't get selected by an editor and 'featured' it just shows to your followers (of which I have about none in the scheme of things...).

So far my post has exactly 0 views so I'm guessing organic reach on Medium is basically killed unless you drive yourself a ton of followers through engaging other posts or being one of the lucky selections by an editor (I'm not sure how likely that is given the volume of stuff posted there).

It seems like the easy days are gone anyway where you could just post, fire and forget. Given that it was always a low time/easy money place for me I'm not sure if I should invest any time there or if it's better to just focus on things like LinkedIn where one can still pick up some easy reach if a few people hit like early etc a post tends to do pretty well etc even if not many more hit like.

Anyone have any more coherent thoughts?! I'm far from a Medium expert, was just enjoying the easy ride a couple years ago and was surprised how much they seem to have changed it - not sure why anyone would post there vs virtually anywhere else now.

 

[pluto]

What were you doing on Medium originally to get reach? The trick used to be, and mostly still is true, that if you are posted to a large publication and the initial batch engages well, you get promoted fairly widely. And if there was enough momentum, it was fairly easy to make the home page and the top list.

I didn't get any views from just publishing, but I didn't have many followers. That only changed when I joined popular publications.

Publications today still work, but a lot more saturated. Higher volumes of posts and much harder to get on the trending list of Medium. A lot more slots on the homepage and shares are chosen by editors now.

Truthfully, I never thought Medium was great for bloggers to post to, but I still think it's easier to get distribution there than building your own site.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Truthfully, I never thought Medium was great for bloggers to post to, but I still think it's easier to get distribution there than building your own site.

Thanks - appreciate the reply and insight. I wasn't really doing anything before so no idea how I ended up doing well with a few posts - one seemed to pick up some organic links and gets search traffic to this day (which I only just noticed) so that probably was something to do with it... I must have accidentally written some SEO copy . I think it's likely pitching publishers not on medium ends up being better for me than pitching publishers on medium if I'm going to be pitching people to guest post, especially if the homepage is locked down as you say. I shall go off and do that instead!

 

[pluto]

Thanks - appreciate the reply and insight. I wasn't really doing anything before so no idea how I ended up doing well with a few posts - one seemed to pick up some organic links and gets search traffic to this day (which I only just noticed) so that probably was something to do with it... I must have accidentally written some SEO copy . I think it's likely pitching publishers not on medium ends up being better for me than pitching publishers on medium if I'm going to be pitching people to guest post, especially if the homepage is locked down as you say. I shall go off and do that instead!

The one advantage of Medium publications is that many of the publications are hungry for content and many of the editors are pretty lax about approving posts. Once you get accepted to a good publication, you can post pretty frequently and just traffic leak like crazy. The old trick was that there were several big ones. Get accepted to a few of them, which back then was easy, not sure how it is now. Then post very click-baity stuff with email list CTAs at the end. Never went deeply to try to get links, but I suspect if you self-host a domain, you can submit to a publication and eventually take the post out of the publication and put it on your hosted domain on Medium, 301'ing all the links to your domain.

In any case, if you're just looking for some guestposts, I 100% agree that you're better off targeting publishers not on medium. Much more SEO and lasting effects