Why Medium is not my Priority when it comes to Blogging

No doubt about it, Medium is the best blogging platform that ever existed. On top of that, Medium has the best community of writers and readers. So why not choosing Medium as your primary blogging platform?

I have to admit: I love Medium for the amazing user interface and its simplicity. The Medium app is optimized amazingly for reading and in the web, you can type easier than in Microsoft Word. If you are choosing the right headline your post will reach hundreds of users on Medium. This will most likely not be the case for your own blog.

Yes, I am blogging on Medium. Just over the recent days, I gained more than 80 followers. This is amazing! But I am not using Medium as my primary blogging platform. I put my personal self-hosted WordPress blog first. And here is why I will always do so.

Hidden Dangers of Medium

Medium is a venture-backed publishing platform. Twenty-one investors backed Medium in three financing rounds with a total equity funding of $132M. These investors didn’t invest in Medium because they simply love to blog on this platform. They invested with the idea of having a hundredfold return on their investment. To do so, Medium may implement different strategies. They can either earn profits by showing ads or they earn money by charging for the platform. Medium just recently decided for the last option. VC’s are always looking for an exit or an IPO when they invest in companies.

No matter how Medium’s strategy looks like, their investors want them to sell their company or to take it public. This is the big danger for all writers on Medium. I definitely think that Ev Williams (the CEO of Medium) is working on Medium with a lot of passion and without any bad intentions. But will this be the case with Medium’s acquirer or with public stakeholders? They will look for new ways to squeeze out any dollar of profit out of their company.

What exactly will happen if Medium gets acquired?

The acquirer may randomly decide to shut down Medium. He may randomly delete features you love or kick you off the platform without any valid reason. I’m not speculating the worst scenario. I simply looked a few years back. There were many cases where Google, the acquirer of Blogger, randomly kicked off people of their platform. Twitter acquired Posterous and without any warning or real reason it decided to shut the service down. All bloggers who posted only on Posterous suddenly had a big problem.

So, if you are blogging daily on Medium your put your whole content at risk.

Using Medium; Second Only

I love Medium and I truly believe that it is the best blogging platform when it comes to simplicity and user experience. Still, I decided to put Medium second. I blog daily on my personal blog. I run my personal blog on a self-hosted WordPress blog. This costs me around 5-10€ per month in hosting fees. This 5€ equals the fee Medium just recently proposed to charge some users for premium content. By hosting my blog on my own, I have the possibility to download my content regularly. I have full control over what happens to my content. Nobody can kick me off the web.

Medium Should Go Blockchain

The best thing Medium could do is to go blockchain. By utilizing the blockchain technology, Medium would ensure that all blog posts are 100% secure and authors are appropriately compensated. No user would ever have to worry about their content and in addition, great writers may earn their living on Medium. A great but (in my opinion) failing example is steem.it. Nevertheless, it will be nearly impossible to shift from a venture-backed platform to a blockchain based platform.