Our staff at Embla Software Innovation have been contributing to our Medium publication for 2 years now. At the beginning, we chose Medium.com as the ideal platform over an in-house solution or a different platform like Wordpress for a few major reasons:
- Existing Medium tech community and reach
- Better availability (over in-house hosting)
- Easier content adding, management and editing (over Jekyll on Github)
We believed, at that time, that Medium.com was becoming what Twitter did to public message boards: making it more convenient for the audience to find content they want, as well as making a better experience for the writers and contributors.
However, over the time we were using the platform, we became concerned about Medium automatically pushing of paid content over free content even to free readers, which had two consequences on two parties: readers were becoming more frustrated with being click-baited into opening many articles behind a pay-wall, even though they were not paying for the service; writers and publishers were seeing a drastic decline in the reach of their publications and content.
My experience as a reader
I became a paid user of Medium as soon as Medium started giving out the paid plan. But I wasn’t seeing ‘member-only’ content that was relevant to me or my tastes over the months I kept paying for it. Almost all of the content I enjoyed or read was free content. It became clear that I was simply paying money for something I wasn’t getting any return on.
Now, I must make it clear that I stand by the principal of financially supporting writers. My concern was that our support wasn’t being necessarilly funnelled to writers that we actually read. So, I simply stopped paying.
After stopping being a ‘member’, I started noticing how much Medium was pushing ‘members-only’ content to non ‘members’, even though they clearly weren’t able to read them. Even after exhausting the 3-articles per month (later 5-articles) ‘allowance’, free users were constantly getting these paid articles that they inadvertantly clicked on, only to discover they can’t read it.
In my opinion, this was a malicious or at least a very ill-adviced business practice. It was simply making the users frustrated and even more unwilling to convert to ‘members’. I noticed, by April of 2019, that almost my entire feed on the Medium homepage was filled with ‘members-only’ articles, most of which was not even on subjects I was following or interested in. I compared this with my friends who were heavy (yet non-member) Medium-readers and found the that about 95% of links on their homepages were also paid content.
This was quite saddening. Medium was becoming the exact opposite of what it vocally promised to be.
Then Hackernoon happened.
Publisher experience
Hackernoon is a prominent tech-content publisher and a startup that uses Medium as their content host. They keep all their content free with the help of a non-intrusive and small sponsor ad on each sponsored post they share. They have a few thousand contributors on various tech subjects.
Medium stopped supporting new publishers being able to use custom domains for their Medium publications, but this did not affect Hackernoon, since they had been using their own domain ‘hackernoon.com’ as a custom domain long before this change came.
But lately this became a problem. In a podcast published by them, Hackernoon founder David Smooke explains what Medium started doing that made them start moving away from Medium. You can listen to the podcast here or find more links here.
In essence, what he explains is that Medium is trying to make them remove all their sponsor ads from articles and sending mass emails to their contributors without their consent, with misleading/confusing notices, “muddying the water” between their contributors and Hackernoon itself.
The future
We will be gradually moving our existing content into our own subdomain at blog.embla.asia and host it as an open Github repository with Jekyll content-management system. This will allow us more control over our content and layout. We will be able to freely innovate on the presentation of articles and demos and have better SEO.
We will share our new articles on social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Thank you for your patience and support! Please leave your comments and opinions on this situation on Medium and feedback about our actions.