Why Has Nobody Heard of Medium?

And does it matter?

I teach at a Los Angeles university. For my creative writing class I announced that we were going to all publish our writing in our own publication on Medium. (You can see it here!)

“What’s Medium?” was the universal response.

I notified the administration and the other faculty about my plans to publish on Medium, too.

“What’s Medium,” they said.

I told my family that I was publishing a book of stories and poems that my students had written on Medium for my class.”

“Medium? What’s that?”

You get the idea.

It’s very frustrating for this thing I’ve been working on since 2018 — publishing on Medium — to have made what looks like zero progress in its brand name recognition.

It is perplexing why Medium hasn’t taken off in the national consciousness. After all, it was started by a Twitter founder. We’re all so interested and fascinated by Twitter.

Also, some very famous people have published things on Medium. I’m thinking of Obama, of course, who has published a few pieces. This latest piece says Democracy is on the ballot in the midterm elections, and I agree.

President Biden has a Medium profile. His last article here is this one:

There’s also Jeff Bezos, who chose Medium for his very high-profile explanation of his affair with Lauren Sanchez. It has the catchy title, “No Thank You Mr. Pecker.”

It’s the New York thing, stupid.

I know, New York is meant to be the publishing capital. San Francisco is supposed to be for tech. And when tech gets into publishing, well, that’s kind of a problem for New York.

And that would be fine. I could accept that New York is jealous and is keeping Medium on a low profile because it resents there being any other center for letters. There’s only one problem: Substack.

Everybody has heard of Substack.

I’ve actually taken to responding to people when they say, “What’s Medium,” by explaining to them, “It’s like Substack.”

“Oh, right! I love Substack,” they say.

And Substack was founded a full seven years after Medium, in 2017.

It’s also located in San Fran!

So what gives? Why does the world love Substack and not Medium?

Famous writers

See, those other guys I mentioned who were high-profile Medium publishers, they’re not really known as writers. They are known as politicians and entrepreneurs.

But people like Matt Taibbi, Chuck Palahniuk, etc., they give Substack some serious literary street cred.

To big writers like this, it makes sense to come to a place like Substack. For Matt Taibbi, it’s like cutting out the middle man of Rolling Stone and getting paid directly by his fan base.

It wouldn’t make sense for him to come to Medium, where he would have to share the revenue from his readers with all us other authors.

Why doesn’t Medium switch to the Substack model?

Well, they have adopted a bunch of the Substack features, including the feature of rewarding a writer for getting a reader to sign up for Medium — that is almost the same thing as Matt Taibbi getting five bucks every time someone signs up for his newsletter on Substack.

But I still prefer Medium

Because I’m not a name writer. People aren’t going to come to my substack to read me, because I don’t have an already existing list of fans.

I need Medium to find me new readers. And that is something Medium does so well — and Substack is trying to copy. They are trying to develop their “community”, meaning getting people to recommend other Substack writers to readers and so on.

But it’s no Medium.

Does it matter?

Well, I kind of like being involved in this obscure Medium thing. One day, we will be looked upon as the “early pioneers” of this platform. I do think it is the future for publishing. I believe enough in Medium to keep on writing here, even though nobody has ever heard of it.

Should they advertise more?

No! We don’t want them to run out of money. The founder just quit as CEO, don’t forget. And he’s the guy that rustled up four rounds of funding for this baby.

We might not get a fifth round. We probably have to make do with what we’ve got, and just grow the community organically, through word of mouth and so on.

It will grow, I believe in it.

If you write it, they will come!

This is our own field of dreams, I guess. Keep dreaming everyone.

And keep writing!