New Readers Are Killing Publications

And Medium wants them to

To use a pub — or not use a pub. That is the question…

As a writer on Medium, the question of whether to publish your freshly written article through a publication or go with self-publishing is unavoidable. But the answer to that question seems to get more tricky every day.

In all the “How to get xx views on Medium” articles and every other success story published on this site, all of them recommend publishing for publications. Your article will be exposed to more people and a narrowed down target group hence your views will rise. Neat idea, but it seems that it doesn’t work like that for a lot of new writers. Myself included.

And that can totally relate to the publications you submit! I want to point out that the choice of publication is of high importance. A pub that lets anyone write about anything for them is a great starting point for a new writer — again, including myself here as well — but it also means your article will probably not stand out as much. Maybe that is a false observation on my end but I get the impression the more exclusive the pub, the more reads it will bring you as followers feel more secure about the quality of the content.

That means if you publish your whole medium career in one or two pubs that are specifically for new Writers and never try to get into more topic-focused ones the so highly praised pub-effect will not take place.

But this does not explain why huge publications like P.S.I love you and others are shutting down. A development that is very important for the whole picture as it is Medium itself who stopped funding them which lead to their eventual end.

Around the same time, Medium introduced the tag system. When I started to use Medium the tags were already there and as a frequent AO3 user I was not confused or surprised in the slightest. In fact, a tag system made perfect sense to me, as I would guess it does for a lot of people who are accustomed to tools like Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok.

Medium’s stand to position itself as a social media platform rather than, well, anything else always seemed pretty interesting to me. Although I am still unsure how to think of that as a whole, the introduction of the tag system was brilliant in my opinion.

I don’t think I have to prove or argue about the importance of social media and how it has become part of everyday life. The majority of people reading online are used to social media and their mechanics and so Medium does well in integrating tags — the one mechanic most social media sites have in common.

Using tags comes naturally to us.

In fact, we are so used to them that it helps to navigate through new sites and tools much easier. And that is exactly what Medium needs.

I can only speak for myself: As a reader on Medium, I only use tags. It took me a while to understand how the pubs work and even longer to find the ones whose content I truly enjoy.

But tags? I used them the second I landed on this page. I didn’t have to be taught how they work, I already knew. And that is exactly what Medium wants: a user-friendly interface that is almost self-explanatory and easy to use in order to draw in as many new subscribers as possible (That is their main goal; if the also newly introduced referral links weren’t a hint).

With fewer and fewer new readers going through pubs and just relying on the tag system the publications on Medium are going to become more and more irrelevant to the reader and therefore the writer too. I don’t see them vanishing in the near future but I am confident in my prediction of their eventual downfall.

People who have been a part of this community for years now may disagree and see pubs as this integral part of Medium’s DNA. As a fairly new writer, I look at the changes Medium has implemented and clues and hints it has given in the last year about the direction it wants to go and see only one way forward: away from the big pubs and towards the tag-affine self-publisher.

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