I have been writing on Medium until now, which has been a great experience for me. I really appreciate the simplcity and quality of the platform. Also the posts are SEO optimised. Without me trying to spread my posts I still got some handsome traffic from Google. Infact one of my blog is also a top search result. But I wish things were that simple. I found Medium paywall system highly intrusive. I fully support Ad-free web where people should be able to pay some meager money to access the content they like but for Medium it makes less sense
Content on Medium is intellectual property of the author, as per Medium’s own policy. So adding a 5$ paywall just for a text hosting seems quite pricy.
Medium gives only 3 free articles which in my opinion is way less that it should be. It doesn’t take the article length into the account. In my experience the length per article goes around 6 minutes. That means only 18 minutes of reading for non paying users.
I believe in free-knowledge web more than in ad-free web. It would be shame if people can’t read my blog because they can’t afford the subscription.
Medium’s paywall is not really well tuned. Accidental clicks could be registered as read. Which further reduces the number of free articles available.
Your content and the readers locked inside this private wallgarden. Despite you having copyright the content, Its Medium who owns the right to publication. Medium’s policy clearly state that they can suspend the account without any notice, if you don’t stick to their policy.
Overall I see an increase in this sentiment. I dont write to make living, but people who do, have bigger problems with the platform.
What’s Next?
I will from now write on my own hosted domain. I will also import my blogs to Medium for some period. I believe Medium had a nice run. They have a good product which was apprecieated and adopted. They got many people including me into writing.
However currently we have many great opensource tools and ecosystem which can provide high quality of styling and editor, which you can host for free. I will write soon about how I setup my new blog .