Contrarian View — Why Now Is the “Worst” Time to Quit Medium

I won’t be jumping ship to Vocal or News Break

If you’re a half-serious writer on Medium, or even a semi-regular reader, you’d have to convince me to believe you if you said you hadn’t heard of News Break over the past few weeks.

The News Break creator program and the guaranteed $1,000 a month for “early creators” is all the rave on Medium and presumably on any writing platform. And hey, why shouldn’t it be? Any “legit” program that offers guaranteed income at that scale is a golden lifeline for any freelance writers that are struggling to get due credit (and money) for their work in these challenging times.

There’s also of course Vocal, another Medium-inspired platform that doesn’t have the $$-appeal of News Break but has some writers exploring it as well for various reasons.

I, however, am yet to even create an account on any of these and don’t plan to even give it a shot.

In fact, I am sitting here secretly celebrating the apparent mass exodus of writers from Medium, and think this is my golden chance to really nail it on Medium — here’s why.

We’re all fighting for the same readers

I am a fairly new writer on Medium, and do this as a passion rather than a primary income source. Yet, the money is a kick.

It’s a thrill to some like me and to others it may be a primary or an important income source. November was only my 4th full month on Medium, and I was finally able to break into the $100-club which is apparently top 7% of serious writers — YAY!

I made a little over $125 for November.

This was after a constant learning graph with 11.xx, 37.xx, 52.xx in each of August, September, and October respectively. I’ve also been fairly prolific and consistent with my writing — I have close to 150 stories in these four and a half months — averaging about a story a day.

Wait, why am I deviating from the point? Well, THIS is the point.

We, i.e. all writers, are fighting for the same “Member reading time” there is only a finite amount of which. The early-movers on Medium or the star-writers, often two sets of people with significant overlap, such as Tim Denning, Tom Kuegler, Shannon Ashley, and others take a HUGE chunk of this member read time. I’ve seen a fair few of them writing about these new platforms and giving them a shot, even if they may not be “leaving” Medium just yet.

Well, if some of the heavy hitters of Medium start to leave for greener pastures, it gives the next line of writers — the likes of you and me — a chance to shine! The read-times they leave on the table are for us to steal.

And so when I have only just started to learn the tricks of Medium, I don’t plan to move on when there may be a golden opening for the top spots being made available by other more accomplished writers choosing to leave.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

News Break was founded as early as 2015, so it is by no means “new” even though Vocal seems to be a relatively new platform.

This of course means that these are both platforms trying to build their readership and writers’ programs — but we know these things take time.

Medium was founded in 2012, and despite the huge spike from the situation in 2020, has taken years and years of invention and reinvention to get where it is today.

Also, News Break was a “local news aggregator” as the name suggests, and is only now venturing into “content creation.” And call me old fashioned, but I don’t plan on writing my close-to-my-heart precious million-dollar-words (I wish) on a place that calls itself “News Break” — just not happening.

It isn’t to say that these places don’t know what they’re doing — they might very well, but I think Medium is a tried-and-tested platform that has stood the test of time, in a relative sense, and I am willing to take my chances.

Money isn’t the be-all and end-all for me

Better value for your writing and efforts and a series of other issues are the reason that these platforms are coming up in the first place to challenge Medium.

And, it is only fair. In a free market with healthy competition, fueled by the spike in online content owing to the new normal of 2020, players and platforms can’t be blamed for trying.

Yet, to me, money is only a secondary nice-to-have.

There are many sources of information on both the platforms already on Medium. Dr Mehmet Yildiz did a great piece comparing Vocal and Medium for the writers to see for themselves, and there are many detailing News Break such as this one on Medium.

Yet, to me, Medium still stands apart.

Despite its flaws, the democratic platform that it is — a simple example being how it allows writers and readers to openly pitch competing platforms and STEAL its own customers without censoring these, is incredible.

And so, for this simple reason, I am willing to give myself a shot at Medium until I see more reasons to jump ship.

Lastly, the complaints about the “falling statistics” and “failed algorithms”

Another recent trend on Medium is a large number of complaints from writers about lowered read times and less reader engagement.

Aren’t we a little too short-sighted? I probably take the prize when it comes to checking stats on Medium and do it at an awfully high frequency. Yet, I am patient enough to understand these things have cycles.

The world was locked indoors and had nothing to do but read, but it is opening up a bit and people may be spending less time on screens. It was also Thanksgiving weekend, and I’d forgive people to spend more time shopping in person or online, and not be glued to their Medium stories.

There’s also increasing competition from the various aforementioned platforms. But we don’t need millions of readers to read our content, do we? We’re only going to get those few hundreds if we got lucky — and for that much readership, there’s still plenty out there.

And most of us aren’t already earning thousands of dollars a month on Medium, so the scope for growth is plenty. I’ll worry about “saturation” when I am a top 10 earner on Medium and have thousands of followers and thousands of dollars of income from Medium.

But until then, the journey towards growing on Medium is long, and I’ve only just started to understand the rules of the game, and I don’t like to quit until I’ve got myself in the Halls of Fame. So, I am here to stay, but I’d love to know what you are thinking?

Would love the views of my fellow writers and friends and hear what they have to say. Tree Langdon CR Mandler MAT Geetika Sethi Dew Langrial Britni Pepper Julene Cole Tom Handy Jake Mura Maryam Merchant Dr. Marina Harris EP McKnight, MEd Ntathu Allen Paul Myers MBA Arthur G. Hernandez Agnes Laurens Dr John Rose Liam Ireland Stuart Englander Mayank Pamnani Joe Luca Sumera Rizwan Haimish Mead Lynn Dorman, Ph.D.; J.D. Desiree Driesenaar Terry L. Cooper and anyone that cares to share their thoughts!