Custom Domain On Medium
Why Medium Don’t Allow Custom Domain Anymore?
Some publication has a custom domain, can you buy a custom domain on Medium?
Big Update: Medium now allows custom domain for Medium publications and Medium profiles. To connect a custom domain, you need to Join Medium membership at $5 a month.
Medium announces Custom URL at a time when it was not that popular. They do it to make a push to the new content publish on their site and offered a platform that feels more personal. They started offering hosting and custom URL to pay for some specific costs associated. The medium then discontinues this feature because they think offering Custom domain is giving a big favor to big publishers and they might be bad for the branding of Medium organization.
When Medium just launched offering custom domain in beta, custom domain on Medium costs $75.
Some popular Medium publications like PS; I Love You and The Writing Cooperative have their own custom domain. They find this opportunity and then cash it. If I were in that era where Medium was giving the option of buying a custom domain, I would definitely buy it, but else, not good luck at my end.
Why does Medium not allow custom domains anymore?
In a blog post from the Medium help center, they have cited that;
As of November 2017, Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL.
Some reasons why Medium doesn’t allow custom domains anymore.
- Branding: This was Medium’s biggest hit. The medium doesn’t want to lose its taste in branding. People, brands and everyone loves you if you have a brand name. That’s why people bought $1,000 Iphones. While giving access to people to bought a custom domain, Medium give away its branding and this made Medium release that they have made a mistake. If you want to learn about Branding, study YouTube; they know how to brand.
When you publish a story on Medium and it is on the Medium.com domain then the same URL is shown in the search engines but if, let say, “The Writing Cooperative” is publishing a story using the Medium infrastructure, but still its stories will be shown on Google search with its own Custom domain.
- An alternative option was to make your own Publication. This was a very initial feature of Medium, when they started giving away its custom domain, they give the opportunity to convert a Medium publication into a Custom URL. Some publication did that while other go with a Medium URL.
The medium publication is like Facebook groups but on steroids. Publishing your story in a publication makes it more favorable to be seen by more people as well as getting ranked in Google search.
Even though Medium is a very open platform for people who want to drive traffic and choose not to monetize their Medium stories through the Medium partner program. But, still, this platform chooses not to allow people, later, to not buy a custom domain.
Can you buy a custom domain from Medium?
No, you can’t. They have stopped offering custom URLs to Medium publication editors. If you publish one story on Medium, then you could get this opportunity of creating a Medium publication. Medium publications are free and anyone can create them, but before November 2017, You have to pay $75 to Medium in order to get a custom domain.
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