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Medium

Score9.6 out of 10

27 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Medium?

Medium is a blogging and web publishing platform from the company of the same name in San Francisco, California.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Medium.
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Medium is the best place to get experience and showcase my portfolio.

Incentivized
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Medium as a portfolio for the various areas I've worked in and can teach. I also use it as a source for a "Publication" I've created, including others in the community and focusing on a subset of a subject. This is a way of showing prospective employers in my life that I have the necessary knowledge without subjecting them to a short and uninteresting resume.

Pros

  • Content categorization and grouping.
  • The option to make some money from sharing your passion and teaching.
  • Moderating content manually to not promote AI-generated content and boosting very authentic and impactful posts.

Cons

  • Making awareness for Publications.
  • A system to find writers for your publication.
  • Their content-revenue model.

Return on Investment

  • Making enough money to pay back the monthly subscription fee takes a long time to reach that level.
  • I've gotten a lot more recognition for being an SME in many areas and have received more interest professionally.
  • Writing enough articles that are also high enough quality to attract followers takes a lot of time out of my weeks.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress and LinkedIn Publishing Platform

Other Software Used

WordPress, LinkedIn Publishing Platform

Medium is not medium, it is top class!

Incentivized
Kevin O'GradyView profile
Founder in Social Media at The World of Empowerment Organization (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy to read articles.
  • Short and digestible.
  • Quick summary of the highlights.

Cons

  • The payment wall can be confusing.
  • Hard to get traction if you're trying to go viral with an article.
  • Sometimes content gets buried too easily.

Return on Investment

  • It has streamlined our content creation.
  • It has reduced the cost of content production.
  • It has allowed us to produce more faster.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress and Quora Blogs

Other Software Used

WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr

Medium.com - Great way to repurpose your content to a new audience

Lucy JonesView profile
Head of Content in Marketing at Strategic Internet Consulting (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy usage, clear, good features to embed media from video to image.
  • If using the import tool, Medium adds rel=canonical automatically.
  • Great way to engage with, tag and encourage engagement with a relevant readership.

Cons

  • It can be harder to get your content seen as medium is a popular platform.
  • It is still early days for us to track back success (traffic, rank etc) from posting to medium regularly. I hear tracking success outside vanity metrics can be hard for others too.
  • I am yet to figure out how to create and add to magazines - these have the potential to be a good audience booster, but not too clear.

Return on Investment

  • Good way to raise awareness of our content with @mentioned influencers
  • Good way to link back to your original content
  • Aside from publishing your own content Medium is a great news site in its own right. If you're looking for relevant industry news or other content, check in daily to see what's going on with others in your industry.

Medium: Editor is Sharp, Content Marketing? Meh

Incentivized
Jack Edward HealdView profile
Marketing Consultant, Certified Marketing Partner, in Corporate at Conversion Marketing Experts, LLC (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • The editor is surprisingly robust and easy to use.
  • Embedding media - while not intuitive - is very easy.
  • The default formatting of content is visually quite pleasing. It's nice to not worry about that.

Cons

  • I think the broad reach of Medium is both a strength and a weakness. It is one more place where we can reach a ton of people, and likewise one more place where we can get lost in the noise.
  • The way you select topics to appear in your feed is pretty simple, but I find that I get a lot of stuff I am not remotely interested in. I don't know if that is because my topic selection was poor, or if the publishers tagged their pieces poorly, or something else.
  • I am still not 100% convinced that Medium is worth our content marketing efforts. On the one hand, it is visually appealing and easy to access. On the other hand, I cannot yet tie any particular marketing success back to our efforts on Medium.

Return on Investment

  • Like I said previously, the jury is still out on whether or not it is positive. I can definitely say it has not hurt us, but I likewise cannot say for sure that it has helped.

Usability