Is Writing on Medium Worth It?

It’s been six months now since I’ve committed most of my time to writing exclusively on Medium.

This journey started as an experiment, one that would be solely focused on crafting my writer’s voice relating to the topics of culture and life, rather than just another business blog.

I also wanted to see how Medium compared to WordPress, Ghost, and Substack, knowing that each platform has their pros and cons.

Digital creators who want to be highly successful should always explore the options to see what generates the best ROI for their goals before firmly planting a flag on any platform.

Besides, it totally sucks when you have to try and move tons of content and find that the export and import tools are often useless.

When I decided to write on Medium I only had a few goals:

1. Find my authentic voice as a cultural writer.
2. See what content generates the most interest from readers.
3. Test the platform for any value or benefits.

Increasing follower count and making passive income were not my objectives. I simply wanted to write for people not popularity.

So has my experiment been worth it?

Before I provide my thoughts on it all, I’d like to share a snapshot of what has been achieved first.

• 54 posts have been published
• 215 response have been written
• 130 followers have been gained
• 5 email subscribers have been earned
• $53.30 in money has been made

My top two performing posts have been an Open Letter to Feminists and a Open Letter to Men. No shock there!!!

Looking at this solely from a business and monetary perspective, writing on Medium has not been worth it. The ROI at this moment is horrible for the time it’s taken me to do all this work.

However, I also didn’t set out to make this about business, otherwise I would have done things differently.

And we can’t forget the long-tail of our work either because it can take years to get real traction from our efforts.

Looking at this solely from an experiment perspective, writing on Medium has been totally worth it. The opportunity to explore the possibilities with very little costs (only membership and time) is awesome.

If your goal is to test the waters, receive some feedback, and hone in on your writing style, this is the place to do it.

Of course the added benefits are reading articles from other amazing writers and content creators, while also building some community.

Overall I’m very happy with my progress on Medium for the amount of effort I’ve actually put into it.

There are many reasons I like writing here, though I’ll always keep a backup of my content in case of an “online fire.” And I’ll be working on an actual content strategy while building a mailing list to see just how far I can take this adventure.

Finally, I am still evaluating the Friend of Medium program.

I was totally against it at first, but after some prodding, decided to test the waters. I’ll update my thoughts in a few weeks.

So if you’re considering writing on Medium, give it a whirl.