Why I’m Leaving Medium

I’ve been writing on Medium for three and a half years.

In that time, I’ve written somewhere north of 100,000 words, in more than 50 long-form essays, read by many tens of thousands of people. I’m a “Top Writer” in two of the most popular categories on the site — Productivity and Reading — and have more than 8,000 followers between my personal profile and my publication. Praxis is a paywalled publication generating almost $2,000 in recurring monthly revenue from 400+ subscribers.

I don’t think there’s anyone more invested in the success of Medium than I am. And over the next week I’ll be taking my writing and my audience to a new WordPress blog (the one you’re reading now).

In this article I’ll explain why, despite all this investment, functionality, and exposure offered to me for free, it still makes no sense for me to stay. I’m hoping it will shed some light on blogging-as-a-business, provide the Medium team some useful feedback, and explain to my audience why I’m putting them through this migration.

Subscribe here before April 29 and you’ll get a one-month free trial, and be grandfathered in permanently at the old rate of $5 per month (or $50 per year). After that it will be $10 per month or $100 annually.

The death of freemium

In December of 2016, I received an email from Medium about an experiment they were running to allow publications to charge for their content. This seemed unthinkable at first. It seemed contrary to everything I’d ever learned about blogging.

The conventional marketing wisdom is that you should open the doors of your blog as wide as possible, because it is your best customer acquisition channel. It is the easiest and most frictionless way for someone to “try out” what you have to offer. Once hooked, a reader can be turned into a customer by selling them other products or services.

But around that same time I started reading Stratechery, Ben Thompson’s email newsletter offering “analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media.” He writes one free weekly article, and paid daily articles dissecting and explaining the news and trends of the day.

First, I noticed his impressive business model: $10 per month (or $100 per year) for in-depth articles that could reach any number of people at almost no marginal cost. Internet rumor has it that he has more than 10,000 paying subscribers, which would suggest monthly revenue of $100,000.

Again, this contradicted everything I thought I knew about media. I don’t think there is a topic more oversaturated than tech news and analysis, and here was one man single-handedly producing the best content in the whole industry. Reading the short Stratechery updates each weekday has allowed me to drop dozens of other news sources and still come away with a better understanding of what’s happening in technology and why.