I'm Joining the Medium Exodus, Here's My Story
Hint: It's Not About The Money
Introduction
I was conversing with another user on Medium who made mention of my Medium Membership status, when they asked, “is [the subscription] worth it?” Little did they know, I was currently exiting the midst of crossroads between platforms. I’ve been on Medium for almost two years, yet in the past few weeks, I have been researching new sites to move to. I wasn’t even sure I’d made the decision until that very same day. So, I gave a terribly long reply, which I’ll now use as the foundation for the below.
Is It Worth It?
I wouldn't recommend a Medium Subscription to anyone. I’ll share my history, which will give good context as to why.
Why Not?
My blogging quest began a few years ago. My passion is games, so I was writing reviews, sometimes quite lengthy ones, but was only publishing them on Steam, and Backloggd (which I ADORE and recommend wherever I can). I realized some time after this, if I’m going to ever try and use my degree—which is officially Technical Communication and Rhetoric with a Multimedia Development minor, but is also technically what they make students obtain who want to go into Journalism—I’m going to need a more official looking site to host my writing. It was my impression that gaming publications or whoever else wouldn’t take me seriously otherwise. Thus, my Medium journey was born.
I already had written over 100 game reviews by this point, and luckily Medium’s ‘import story’ tool made moving them all over a cinch. In no time, I had swaths of articles ready to be published in a very professional looking space with the push of a button. But then, Medium tempted me with their membership model. ‘Paywall your articles and get paid to write’, was the name of the game, and I was ready to play.
“Why not get paid to write?” I told myself, as I filled out my credit card information. I wasn’t a fan of the ‘pay us to pay you’ business model, but hey, in no time I’m sure it’ll pay for itself right? Let’s enable that paywall and get paid. So I got started, and began uploading my back-catalogue of game reviews, almost consistently publishing one or two a day.
Growth in those beginning times was slow, but expected. But I was gaining followers, and earning money. Here are some charts that showcase that time period.
That massive spike? Not sure what happened. You can see the trend line for views starts at 2.5 views per day and ends at around 7.5, so it was trending upwards. But the read trend line? Starts at one, and ends at one. No significant growth there. I have two charts because at one point I had both of these combined, but as my follower count stagnated, and my article count grew, those two metrics started to really hurt how I viewed the chart so they got moved into their own, weird combo chart together.
The interesting thing to note is that, while I stopped publishing articles for a minute, that initial surge in December injected that much-needed lifeblood into my overall performance.
Previously I said that I earned money doing this, but I’ll be real with you. It was pennies. But I was getting them paid out to me every month. “I’ve got dinner tonight, babe! My Medium payout just hit!” I’d joke, flaunting the 15 cents that I earned in the last month.
So I made $2.45, but lost $47.55 to earn it. It didn’t initially bother me, as the year previous I had made a similar venture into the world of Squarespace for $150 bucks, but I got cold feet when Medium announced a minimum $10 payout. No more spare change for me. So, I did my research. I learned that to break even on the subscription, I’d need a solid 1000 views (or reads?) at the very least. At the pace I was growing, with this trend line I had… I could see that wouldn’t be anytime soon. So I quit cancelled my monthly subscription.
Wait a Minute…
It’s interesting how during this time, I really didn’t put in a ton of work. Honestly, I half gave up on this whole thing entirely, and didn’t recommit to it until earlier 2025, hence all the growth there. The odd thing to me is that even just publishing one article here or there during the ‘drought’ would make my analytics surge.
You can see in the start of February, my reading line started lift-off. Went several weeks without hitting 0 reads, then it touched down just once in March, but kept climbing after that. Trend lines looking good too, views are at about 9, reads around 4, which shows good growth, +1.5 views, and +3 reads as compared to the previous period. Not much but it’s something, and I knew at some point because of the back catalogue it had the potential for an exponential spurt.
It’s not a ton of growth, since the old membership times, and it’s nowhere near the ‘1000’ I needed to zero out the cost of a membership. But… I resubscribed.
We’re… back?
I’ve only just recently recommitted to being a part-time unpaid creator, but I’ve been diligent about doing just about everything. One of the affordances of games journalism is being able to receive free games to review, if you’re considered Accredited Press. This is most popularly done through Keymailer.co, a game key distribution platform. They have a section that allows you to claim yourself as a games’ journalist. I had over 100 articles, so I’d consider myself as much. I applied.
They rejected my application. Reason cited? Medium is not considered reputable press. But the person reviewing my application left me with a secret. If it was under a different domain, they’d pass my off as accredited
“Alright” I said to myself, “I’m pretty sure I can do that on Medium…” Turns out you can. But you have to get a membership.
Listen, folks, I don’t need to be considered ‘Accredited Press’. I really don’t. I have 3,600 followers on TikTok and 500 on YouTube. Among that following, I don’t have many regulars, and can hardly even get my friends to interact with my stuff. I’m the smallest fish in the sea to anyone who has ever been anyone in games journalism. But… Wouldn’t it be cool, though?
ACCREDITED PRESS OUTLET THENAMEBRAND
Since then, I decided while I’m here, I might as well enable the paywall. After all, a lot of Medium creators say the rumour is, when the paywall is up, articles get boosted throughout the site to other members, and actually improve performance. So that’s exactly what I did… There’s no easy option to do it either. I had to re-enable the paywall on every single individual article. Though that process, I consistently added new articles, more so than ever before, and you know what I’m seeing now that it’s all behind that beautiful wall? Disappointment.
ALL of my metrics have been trending downwards. In these past 60 or so days, I've earned exactly $0.08 cents. My reads have dropped to zero multiple days and are not showing signs of improvement. Views took a hit too. Despite consistenting pushing out articles over the longest period of time since I started this journey, it’s clear that the Medium paywall killed my growth on the platform considerably. In May I had 471 views, 197 reads. June was the first paywall month and gave me 342 views and 125 reads. Now, all of July shows I only had 287 views and 77 reads. I guess we can kiss that ‘paywall boosting’ rumor goodnight, because it is clearly not true for me!
In fact, I think turning on the paywall was a huge mistake. Unless I magically start to have my analytics pop off after this goes live, it’s clear to me that adding articles to the paywall is doing nothing but negatively affecting my overall growth on the platform. Time to manually remove most of them from the paywall then…
To a degree, my meager earnings and performance is totally understandable. I'm not writing the 'gospel' recommended 2 articles per day, and more than that, I think that Game Reviews are a subset of a subset that most people aren't just gonna casually seek to read as an audience. So I knew from the start it would likely be a failing venture. But originally, it wasn’t about gaining an audience right? This is the professional place for my ‘professional work’. If it cost me a membership to be press, it cost me the membership. That’s business. Right? But still… Why is this happening to me?
In my small understanding I know that Google favors Medium and ranks articles from them quite high in search. I have a few pieces that must have hit the search jackpot which naturally brought in a bunch of readers during the no-paywall era. I can see as much in the analytics of a few YouTube videos that I've linked at the top of some articles that some traffic is indeed originating from Medium.
Perhaps with the paywall, they are ranked differently or prevent viewers from converting into followers or readers, or something along those lines. I'm not sure, but that feels like what's going on because that’s the only thing that’s changed. So I’m definitely going to slowly revert it. Perhaps I’ll have a follow up article. I don’t know.
Let’s talk about my Charts
You may have noticed all of my charts are snippets from Google Sheets. I’ve got my own way of tracking every metric I get from Medium, except for claps. Can you guess why?
The metrics in Medium, and the way they display them for users is extremely annoying. They have all this data on me, for every single day I’m on the platform, for every single article and interaction, and what do they do with it? Create the most basic of chart to show me, with a restrictive date range. That is why I made my own sheet. Compare what I’ve shown you so far with the only chart and data Medium generates for you on your “Stats” page.
You can see why I started MY OWN spreadsheet so that I could log, myself, every day, my own metrics. It’s borderline unhelpful. I want to be able to manipulate the data and see it in ways that are actually meaningful.
Here’s a fun fact as a consequence of that: today is my 663rd day on Medium, aka, the 663rd column on my spreadsheet. My charts have customizable ranges, and trend lines that help me determine my growth. They show me all the money I’ve lost. I can attempt to correlate some key metrics together. It's wild that there is no other way to do this on the platform. You know what, if you want a template version of my spreadsheet, let me know, maybe I’ll add it to my Patreon or something.
You might be thinking, “okay. I definitely won’t get a Medium membership in attempts to earn money. It’s not working out for this guy. But I still think it would be fun to read the member-only stories.” Now, I don’t want to continue to be negative, but I've never read an article on there, that was for member's only that has ever made me reflect and think "wow, I'm glad I have my membership so I could read that!" (my articles included). A little subjective, but still.
Get to the Point Already
My objective was to house all of my writing in a semi-professional way to show potential employers, should I ever want to go into games journalism. Medium has helped with my objective. I succeeded with it there. But it seems public sentiment with Medium has trended downtrend (perhaps alongside my metrics), so what if I left? What if I casually looked at other options. So I have been. It’s been very rewarding.
If I had an audience on something like YouTube, and wanted to leverage that outlet, hands down I’d move in a heartbeat to Patreon or Ko-Fi, which would make a ton more sense. They have some exceptionally powerful tools, each of them, to be able to write blog posts, and give you greater ways to give back to readers. My only issue with that, is that it may not look as professional as Medium, and I believe in both cases you cannot bring your own domain name, both of which would go against my original objective. Perhaps if I already had an audience, I could probably circumvent that. In any case, it’s free to start with no membership option to tempt me so I have accounts on both of those platforms ready to go.
Here We Are
I rediscovered Substack alongside Ko-Fi and Patreon, set up my account, and poked around a bit. Everything on Substack makes so much sense. Using my domain is a one time purchase. Every user has their own “website” essentially, to organize different articles or forms of content. It’s clean, modern, CLASSY. I could not believe my eyes. Competitor to Medium? No. Medium is just a cheap copy of Substack. It just makes sense for how I want my writing to exist online. It's extremely customizable, and it feels so good to use as compared to Medium, which is laughably archaic in contrast.
Like, for example, if you’ve used Medium, maybe you’ve been lucky enough to get a reply on one of your stories. Do you have email notifications on for that? Very cool how it puts as much of the reply in the subject line as possible, right? That was definitely thought through for sure...
Conclusion
Honestly, I recommend all humans look into Substack, which seems to have more of a growing culture of community, and the site seems to be getting frequent updates that make it feel professionally modern. I’ve spent several good long hours setting up my website, and it feels even more profssional than how my Medium profile or publication looks. Maybe it’s just personal preference but I’ll let you decide for yourself by providing a handful of screenshots.
Substack has so many customization options it makes my mouth water. The settings run for miles and miles. The metrics tracked on each post? Absolutely beautiful as well, I loved seeing that.
Medium helped me see the vision of online blogging, but after poking around for a few afternoons with their alternatives, I don't think it's my end game. If you want a simple way to blog, Medium will serve you great, but don’t expect to ever get paid from it if you’re not going to dedicate your life to writing oodles of SEO infused articles. And in any case, I wouldn't recommend the membership. No article has ever been worth reading, and the amount of members eyes you need on your stuff before you actually start making a profit is ludicrous. Since that’s the case, why not start on a platform where getting paid will come from people that actually care about what you’re writing? Alas, these are just one man’s thoughts.
I don’t usually write rambly, lengthy articles about this kind of stuff. I should have been writing about games today in all honesty. But, maybe this is helpful to you, and even if a single word was helpful then I’ll have met my objective with it.
If you’re into video games and don’t mind reading reviews about them… Consider subscribing to my Substack. Thanks for reading, and best of luck to you.