Medium is Blogging for the 9%
I’ve tried so many times to create my blog using Github, Ghost, and a custom domain, but every time I find a distraction that keeps me from doing the actual thing, writing than designing or boiler plating my blog.
After reading the first few chapters of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, I decided to remove the “distractions” and focus on “tractions” as Mark Manson calls it, which in this case is just writing on Medium and regularly than finding a new fancy blogging platform.
You’ll Reach To Your Audience
One of the main reasons I think you shouldn’t start your own blog is that due to chronic indexing on Google and SEO, no one probably finds your personal blog easily; because a huge amount of information is being created every single day and for your to get discovered need to be bold and that’s what Medium is.
Medium algorithms will help you so that you can share your posts with people with a weekly/monthly on a digest and send it to your audience so that they can find and read content faster.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
This one the of other advantages of using Medium is that you can syndicate your posts with big publishers e.g. BetterProgramming, TheStartup or other publishers that are always looking for good authors which gives you a chance to build trust with your audience using their credit and achieve more.
Medium is for the 9%
There’s an internet rule called 1%-9%-90% which states 1% create, 9% comment/interact/curate, 90% consume. Let me borrow this construct and apply it specifically to web publishing:
WordPress is for the 1%. There are content creators who want their own dry piece of land, a full featured CMS and total control over their blog. I am one of these people. These folks also are happy to deal with their own content promotion and try to build an audience. They construct their own themes and topics to write about, and most of the content is original to them.
Medium is for the 9%. These people want to write but don’t want to maintain a blog (hence the publishing tool and centralized namespace). They sometimes need inspiration or to feel like part of something bigger (hence collections). They aren’t focused on driving their own traffic (hence promotion). They don’t want to blog daily or necessarily establish an ongoing readership. They like feedback (hence comments) but don’t want to get into flame wars.
Tumblr is for the 90%. The masses want to collect, comment and republish other people’s assets. They use Tumblr to express themselves. They’re part of a community and the content they create gets pushed and reblogged via Tumblr Dashboard. Most of the content is not fully original (that’s not to say there isn’t unique content on Tumblr or that the remixing itself isn’t highly creative, more so that if you look at Tumblr in its entirety — not just the popular hipster urls — it’s a lot of YouTube videos, imgur pics, etc. Not a judgment).
That’s Ev Williams comment on Medium, so don’t’ waste your time, write regularly and spend your time wisely.
