Why I Still Write on Medium

I write what I want to say, hit publish, walk away, and get paid.

I never had to write anywhere else. Before publishing on Medium, I wrote many pieces that could have been published publicly but weren’t. I wrote them for an audience of one and never looked back at them after the ink dried.

Today, I want to discuss why I choose to write and publish on Medium. But first, let me briefly walk you through my coming of age story. From there, we’ll walk through the different aspects of Medium that I fell in love with and some selfish reasons for why I stick around.

How I arrived on Medium

I fell in love with writing when I was a child in elementary school. My teacher, Mrs. Smart, would give us 10 words each week for which we had to write sentences as homework. At some point, I decided it would be a better use of my time to write continuous stories from those words instead of discrete sentences. The stories I wrote helped forge my love of writing and expand my imagination. The longest running story I wrote was one about a red-eyed cat. I had this story saved in a word document on my computer, and the only other copy of it was presented to my teacher as my homework. Unfortunately, my computer’s storage failed one day in 2003, so that story is like a distant dream now.

Nonetheless, my hard work on that story didn’t go in vain. In 2005, in 5th grade, I won first place in the D.A.R.E essay contest. This was a culmination of all the time I spent writing during my free time. The certificate of achievement for the program still hangs in my parent’s living room. The first place D.A.R.E lion has traveled with me from my childhood home, to university, across the country to San Francisco for my first career job out of college, and back to the east coast.

Riding on my joy from that essay contest, I continued to overachieve when tasked with writing assignments in middle and high school. My essays often ran longer than expected. My teachers loved my essay titles. My classmates grew annoyed when I handed in each 5-page paper early. School was a great place for me to fall in love with writing. I only had a single reader to please, and my success depended on me doing just that.

That continued to college. Up to this point, I hadn’t published anything publicly. My teachers and, occasionally, my classmates were my only audience. That all changed one day when my freshman year English professor was so pleased by one of my essays that she suggested I publish it online. This was very new to me. I had no idea where to start, so I started by googling.

I looked for the best places to publish my work. I’m sure I looked through a couple options, but I landed on a simple platform that was beautiful and easy to get started. It was called Medium and the year was 2013.

If you’re new to Medium, take some time to learn about its history from this timeline masterfully prepared by Casey Botticello: A Brief History of Medium.

The story my professor wanted me to publish online was titled “How to Succeed”. The subtitle was “Fail”.

It was a simple idea: to succeed, you need to be willing to fail. I published it on Medium on November 4th, 2013, and it was relatively well received. The amount of engagement was high. People read it. They highlighted phrases that resonated with them. The people who the story touched the most reached out to me personally to discuss it.

I was in a whole new world, and I was loving it.

Medium made my first experience with publishing online wonderful. In this piece, I want to break down why I fell in love with Medium and why I’ve continued to publish on the platform despite what some would consider recent regressions.

Medium’s editor is free of distractions

When I found Medium, I understood it immediately. It was such a simple idea. Of course, I had the benefit of never having to experience the before times of WordPress and building my own blog from scratch. Despite that, I knew of the tougher solutions blogging. I knew there were worse things out there. I knew that in order for this platform to be what it is, the creators had to have seen worse days.

In the moment immediately the page loaded, I could appreciate the decade of pain those who came before me had to endure for me to be here on this beautiful platform. It was pure. The virgin page gleamed from margin to margin with white space as far as the eyes could see. There was nothing but a cursor and a button that said “Publish”. There were absolutely no distractions.

There were no colors to choose. I didn’t have to layout my page. Customization wasn’t an option. The only path forward was through the words in my mind; all I had to do was let them flow through my finger tips, onto my keyboard, and across the screen. I was in love. I stayed in love. Nothing has changed in the 6 years since.

In that short time, I’ve written my living story via this editor.

I’ve built and sold a publication via this editor. I’ve published a full-length book via this editor. I’ve launched numerous products via this editor. I’ve shared my pain via this editor. I’ve launched STEM a scholarship via this editor. I’ve shared advice and learnings via this editor.

Thanks to the Medium editor, all of that and so much more were achieved without distractions.

Publishing on Medium is super easy and delightful

Once your draft is crafted, all that’s left to do is push the “Publish” button. The rest is handled for you. Medium hosts the website. Medium keeps the lights on. Medium helps people discover your words. Medium ensures the search engines can index your stories. It’s easy to take it for granted, but I never forget how much Medium is does in the background so that we can all simply push the “Publish” button.

Medium provides analytics delightfully

Medium’s stats weren’t always great, but they’ve gotten much better over the years. Even from the start, they were good enough. These days, the stats tell you how long people spend reading your story, what your audience is interested in, and where your readers originate. They provide all of this in a simple and delightful interface for free.

I built important parts of it

That’s right. I built many parts of Medium in the last four years.

Internship

In 2016, I secured a software engineering internship at Medium. That summer, I built the new “Stories” (submissions) page for publications when publications were a huge deal on Medium — the first time around. You know, those times when publications like The Ringer (now owned by Spotify) were all the rage. The times before they had to leave because things had to change at Medium in order for it to adhere to its mission statement.

That is still the same “Stories” publication editors use to manage their submissions today. I did well enough that summer I was offered a full-time position for the following fall.

If you want to read more about my internship at Medium, I wrote about it here a couple years ago.

First engineering job — 2017

When I returned to Medium after graduating university, I was officially a full-stack software engineer at a fancy Silicon Valley tech startup. I built many of the futures you will come across as you use Medium today. Some of those features include large parts of the curation system, which some writers believe they live and die by, parts of the new story stats page, and many more.

I joined Medium a couple weeks after the Partner Program launched. My very first actual project at Medium was to build the new version of the program’s payments dashboard, which writers still interact with today. That was in the autumn of 2017. It served its purpose at the time, but it can certainly use some more love today.

One of my final projects before I left in 2019 was revamping the publishing experience for writers. When you push that “Publish” button in the editor, you see the beautiful new WYSIWYG publishing experiencing that I led the development of. This project was large and required a lot of care and creativity. It helped that I was a writer on the platform for which I was building the publishing experience. Here’s a look at the finished product:

I have established roots here

I have over 8,000 followers

Medium makes it incredibly easy to build an audience. All you have to is publish valuable content, and readers who enjoy your work can follow you with the click of a button. When you publish, your followers have a better chance at seeing your stories in their feed.

I’ve managed to slowly acquire over 8K followers over the last 6 years. I haven’t put much effort into this department, but still they came. That goes to show that your writing will speak for itself. If you write interesting and valuable words, readers will want to come back for more.

I built Smedian for Medium publication editors and writers

When I secured an internship at Medium in 2016, I needed a way to learn the programming languages they used before I had to start that summer. Given that and my need for a writer management system for my publication, which was built on Medium, I built and launched Smedian. Smedian is the defacto platform for writers to discover and request to contribute to Medium publications. Today, Smedian also maintains the leaderboards of over 11,000 top and fastest growing Medium publications.

I self-published my book on Medium

I wrote my first book during my junior year in college. I couldn’t think of a better place to publish it than on Medium. I wanted it to be free to the public. I wanted it to be an enjoyable reading experience. I wanted the students to be able to highlight passages that were important to them. I wanted readers to be able to share the book with their network so the book could reach more students. You can still read it on Medium today; thousands of students and teachers from around the world have read it on Medium.

You can earn decent passive income

If you buy a $1,000 worth of stocks in AT&T today, with their current 7% dividend yield, you can expect to receive $70 in dividends over the next year.

That’s great, but I’m still earning $20 a month from a story I published on Medium over two years ago. All it cost me was a couple hours in the middle of the night on some random day that I felt inspired to type out words, which summed to eleven minutes in reading time. That story is “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Medium”; if you’re just getting started on Medium, I highly recommend it.

I only recently started participating in the Medium Partner Program, but I decided to paywall most of the stories I’ve published since 2013. They earned me $45 in April and are trending beyond that for May. That’s the beauty of publishing on Medium.

If you write great content, provide value to readers, and know how to keep that content circulating throughout the internet, Medium will continue to send you money each month. I have my ways of doing this: ManyStories (share and organize your stories regardless of where you publish), Signal (schedule and recycle your tweets), and Smedian (join growing Medium publications); full disclosure: I built all of them.

Medium has amazing SEO

Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m truly amazed by how much Medium is optimized for search engines. I’ve used Medium to rank #1 on Google for so many competitive keywords. If you grow large enough on Medium, just about everything you write will rank highly on Google.

Conclusion

Medium started as a platform for writers to publish without distractions. Today, Medium is a platform built for sharing your words with readers around the world. All you have to do is write what you want to say, hit publish, and walk away. The rest is handled for you, and, if you’d like, you will get paid for your words. That’s why I still write on Medium and think you should, too.