Illumination vs. the Ascent: Can This New Pub Really Defeat a Colossus
How Illumination is becoming the most popular publication on Medium
2022 Update — Ascent is not on Medium anymore. Illumination still shines.
Yesterday, 529 people followed Illumination. Only 100 followed the Ascent. The total reading time is 11,958,342 minutes for Illumination. Its writers earned more than half a million dollars in its first year 🍻.
If you are a writer, you think — all the time.
‘Will a big publication accept my story?’ you think. If you are a decent writer — the plagiarist is an indecent one — and you submit a story to Illumination, you can safely assume that it will be published. This is the spirit of writing on Medium.
Why are the editors of huge publications so finicky? Because they accept the best and reject the rest. Illumination is the only publication that publishes your work as it is. It allows new writers to learn by making mistakes.
Medium elevates the stories it chooses for further distribution — but the Illumination team promotes almost everybody. Some of our editors rank stories for originality, creativity, and the potential to go viral — as in the Top 10 series.
Let’s come back to our hot🔥 topic. Will Illumination move ahead of the Ascent in the next six months?
These are some of the reasons you might be right in thinking what you are thinking:
Why can no other pub match Illumination’s growth?
It has something to do with the quality vs. quantity debate.
The Ascent editors select quality — almost the highest end of the quality spectrum. Only the best work of excellent writers is published in the Ascent.
They publish ten stories — or less — every day. The top 10.
But Illumination publishes hundreds of stories. Dr Mehmet Yildiz had to start new pubs to handle the long queue.
Writers are insatiable readers too. Once they see their work getting some attention, they are willing to do more. This differentiates Illumination from other pubs.
The differentiation led to the increase.
The growth of a publication is a serious business. Around 92 percent of the people give small businesses a more favorable rating. Or people love variety, and they want to try new things.
New writers get rejected — a lot. They lose motivation to write and submit again. But new pubs need new writers, and it is a win-win situation for both.
The pandemic drove new writers to Medium. Illumination happened to be there at the right time.
To provide more variety, Illumination has to accept that some stories will be less than good. That is okay. Writers are not born great — they forge themselves into good wordsmiths.
At Illumination, the editorial team realized that the quality goes down if the writer writes more than three stories in a day. However, there is no limit for experienced writers.
Dealing with hundreds of new writers, the Illumination team shows humility, kindness, and genuine care.
Illumination never pretended it was a big pub.
There are 16,235 publications on Medium. Most of the new pubs start with high aims, fixed rules, and lots of policy guidelines.
They pretend they are the New Yorker.
Even now, when Illumination is a prominent publication with 88,052 followers, its culture is original, vulnerable, and responsive. It is not rigid.
I heard something similar from Jeff Bezos. He said he wanted to retain the spirit of a new company. Even when Amazon had grown to be a huge company.
When Illumination will be an even bigger publication, this spirit of newness — this eagerness to deliver on promises — is going to make it a safe choice to publish your heartfelt stories.
Illumination is more relational.
Evan Williams thinks you develop a relationship with a publication or a writer as you read more from him or her.
“One of the things I loved about blogging when I started blogger — and that people enjoy about writing newsletters today — is the feeling that you’re publishing to a relatively consistent group of people who care what you have to say.” ~ Evan Williams
Illumination creates that kind of small and relatively consistent group. I have noticed — during the last year — that most of my group reads my articles from start to finish. Because average reading times are close to the story’s reading time. This means when someone from my group reads the story, he or she reads it without skimming.
Six months before Evan Williams wrote these words, Dr Mehmet Yildiz had made the relational aspect of blogging a component of Illumination’s content and promotion strategy.
Sharing your thoughts and life story creates lasting connections.
Illumination publishes stories lightning-fast
New writers want results fast. They want to test new ideas, and they can’t wait fifteen days for a response.
Illumination makes life easy for them. Many stories, rejected by famous publications, went viral when published by Illumination. That is what writers want.
Delivering means working fast on the submission queue. It means quickly addressing the problems that writers face. Illumination acts fast, and writers love it.
Happy writers write more stories. More stories bring more readers. Simple.
Serendipity is an Illumination value.
You cannot expect a miracle unless you open your heart and mind. There has to be enough uncertainty and chaos — that things can interact in unexpected ways — to let serendipity work.
Serendipity is not a mad man’s dream. It is an actual phenomenon. We exist and thrive as human beings on this planet because of the goldilocks belt and golden ratios. Against seemingly impossible odds — we are here.
When you believe serendipity exists, you don’t force rules and regulations so hard that people become discouraged.
If serendipity is not a value of your publication
You live in fear of vanishing. You feel stressed that readers will stop reading your publication if you published anything less than perfect.
To provide quality, you restrict interaction. You stop accepting new writers, and you stop publishing the work of new writers. You do not answer the questions of the new writers.
If you don’t anticipate serendipity, you say, “Please do not email us. If your story is not published within 15 days, understand that we have politely rejected it.”
The head of Illumination is a leadership expert.
Dr Mehmet Yildiz knows a lot more about leadership than the owners of many other publications. He is committed to using social media. He is working on his YouTube, Linked In, Quora, Facebook, Reddit, Good Reads, Flipboard, Twitter, Substack, and other social media accounts — to promote his publication. Oh, sorry, your publication that he started for you — Illumination.
If you go to his WordPress blog, he calls himself Digital Mehmet. Why? Because he has written books — that are available on Amazon — and the title of one of the books is: Digital Leadership.
Here also shared chapters of his Digital Intelligence book on Medium.
He has 40 years of experience in the technology sector, including working for IBM. You can learn about his background and editorial role on Medium from the attached post by Illumination.
Dr. Yildiz shares his health and well-being stories in his publication Euphoria on Medium.
Many people not only want to follow him but want to be him. I found eight people who call themselves Mehmet Yildiz — and he has reported dozens of false DMYs to Medium in the past:
Our collective aim is to be an innovation catalyst for a transformed content ecosystem. ~ Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Illumination Slack Channel
Illumination’s slack channel is a world in its own right. Tree Langdon is our Slack specialist.
Why you should create your own Email List
Dr Mehmet Yildiz is a digital leader. He has a vision and a big heart. In one of his articles, he advised all Illumination writers to have their email list ready at all times.
This kind of leadership has made him well-respected among Illumination writers and editors.
Illumination’s editors are more democratic.
You must be thinking about how Illumination handles hundreds of stories daily. That is the magic of its amazing editors. It is a team of sixty-six editors.
Since many editors struggle to become full-time writers, they feel what the new writers feel. They are true representatives of the majority of Medium writers.
Final thoughts
Our top 10 stories are almost as good as the stories published in the Ascent. At least six Illumination editors work every day to find these gems for you. The work of some of these writers has been accepted by the Ascent.
Qualitywise, it would be tough to defeat the Ascent. But this story is about popularity among writers, winning hearts, and growing fast.
The growth of online publications is not a linear process — it is an unpredictable one. I created this graph to explain the trend:
In twelve months, Illumination went from 0 to 88,052. Can you imagine what is going to happen in the next year?
Perhaps, the only publication growing faster than Illumination is Barack Obama’s publication. But it has no stories yet 🧐.
You can read my curated stories here.
Here is more info about Illumination.
You can apply to join Illumination Integrated Publications as a writer via this weblink.
