The great Medium vs. Substack debate
The conversation is pivoting on the wrong axis and making the same fundamental mistake we made at Writer MBA for years.
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One of the things I see on Substack all the time these days are Medium gurus trying to convince Substack writers that they could be making gobs of money on Medium, which makes my brain play this song on repeat every time I see one.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with showing writers how to make money, but they are making about as bad an argument as you can make to Substack writers, and I’m about to get into why in a second.
Hopefully, this is instructive to them (and maybe you). At the very least, maybe we will stop getting so many terrible sales pitches to write on Medium
(Which again, I have no problem with the sales pitch part or the Medium part. It’s the terrible part that I take exception with and the part that offends my inky black sales manager heart.)
For those of you not in the know about the difference between the two platforms, here is how Substack defines itself.
When readers pay writers and creators directly, they can focus on doing the work they care about most. A few hundred paid subscribers can support a livelihood. A few thousand makes it lucrative.
Today, Substack’s subscription network encompasses more than 35 million active subscriptions, including more than 3 million paid subscriptions. Some of the world's most celebrated writers and creators are here—Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Elizabeth Gilbert, Mehdi Hasan, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to name a few—and they have been joined by a new generation of writers and creators who are building their livelihoods and communities on Substack. As Substack grows to accommodate more writers, podcasters, videomakers, musicians, scientists, and culture-makers of all kinds, we believe that together we can build a new economic engine for culture. We think the internet's powers, married to the right business model, can be harnessed to build the most valuable media economy the world has ever known—an economy where value is measured not only in dollars but also in quality, in good-faith discourse, and in creating an internet that celebrates and supports humanity.
As Substack grows to accommodate more writers, podcasters, videomakers, musicians, scientists, and culture-makers of all kinds, we believe that together we can build a new economic engine for culture. We think the internet's powers, married to the right business model, can be harnessed to build the most valuable media economy the world has ever known—an economy where value is measured not only in dollars but also in quality, in good-faith discourse, and in creating an internet that celebrates and supports humanity.
Substack is where I host this publication and the membership associated with it (where you can get over 850+ exclusive posts, interviews, articles, courses, and more if you become a member).
You basically pay your favorite creators for access to a membership area with extra bonuses, or maybe you just pay them because you think they are neat. It’s very much a creator-led relationship.
Conversely, Medium is more a content-led relationship. Here is how Medium defines its platform.
Medium is an open platform where readers find dynamic thinking, and where expert and undiscovered voices can share their writing on any topic. Over 100 million people connect and share their wisdom on Medium every month. Many are professional writers, but just as many aren’t — they’re CEOs, computer scientists, U.S. presidents, amateur novelists, and anyone burning with a story they need to get out into the world. They write about what they’re working on, what’s keeping them up at night, what they’ve lived through, and what they’ve learned that the rest of us might want to know too. Instead of selling ads or selling your data, we’re supported by a growing community of Medium members who align with our mission. If you’re new here, start exploring. Dive deeper into whatever matters to you. Find a post that helps you learn something new, or reconsider something familiar—and then share your own story.”
They make their model work by charging members a flat fee to read as much as they want on the platform. Readers pay that fee, and writers pay that fee, to access premium features on the platform. Currently, that fee is $60/yr for their base tier and $180 for their highest tier before any discount you might receive.
In the above image, you can see that while most of these benefits are reader benefits, but if you want to create your own custom domain or publication, or customize the app icon, then you have to pay to be a member, too.
Maybe this model will excite some Substack faithful who are constantly crowing about how we need an “all-you-can-eat” model. It already exists, and you can just go do that over there.
The problem with an “all-you-can-eat” model is that there is an unlimited number of articles that only pay out when they are read. For readers, they are inundated with a billion articles and it’s hard for writers to stand out.
The answer Medium came up with to solve this problem was curation. Here’s the best summary I could find about how it works over there right now.
(What’s funny is that it’s impossible to find a Medium article on this topic because you have to be a member to read them. So, I had to go elsewhere to find this primer.)
Here’s how it works:
Community nominators – A select group of publication editors on Medium can nominate stories for a Boost. They are called “community curators.”
Internal review – Medium’s own editorial team vets the nominated stories.
Algorithmic distribution – If a story passes the internal review, Medium’s algorithm widely distributes the Boosted story.
So Boost combines human curation with algorithmic distribution.
The goal is to find and highlight the best individual stories on Medium, not just stories from big-name creators. -Byburk
Even the staunchest Medium supporters seem to agree that the best (and IMO only) way to get paid decent money on Medium is to be consistently boosted.
This article by Linda Carroll is what got me started on this tangent.
A while ago, I wrote a piece I was really proud of. More so than most of my work. I’ll be honest, I kind of expected it to get boosted. I really thought it was that good.
And then? Nothing. No email saying your post has been boosted.
But to add to it?
Short time later I got a private message from the publication editor. She says omg, I’m so sorry. I nominated this and it was rejected. Didn’t want you to think I didn’t try. Because it’s a killer piece, and I did try. I’m so sorry.
Talk about salt in the wound. Because that’s the thing. A piece can’t get boosted if it’s not nominated. And there’s not really a way to know. I’d never put an editor on the spot like that by asking. Don’t want anyone to have to say I’m sorry I used up all my nominations. Or I’m so sorry, there’s stronger posts today. lol. Yikes. No. -Linda Carroll
So, either you play by Medium’s rules and maybe make some money at unknown intervals, you grow (probably too slowly for your own liking) on Substack, or you build a Frankenstein monster that merges both of them.
Seems…reasonable?
Well, it actually sounds terrible, but in that paradigm, of course once you’ve mined all the Medium creators, it makes perfect sense to expand your audience to Substack. After all, writers are writers, right? It’s an untapped well of potential clients.
Oh, you poor, sweet summer child. That was your first mistake. The writer mindset on Substack and Medium couldn’t be more different.
How tho??
The main difference between Substack and Medium comes from the way writers interact with the audience, or even think about audience, on each platform. This difference attracts two completely different type of writers. I think about the platforms like this:
Medium is about dancing for somebody else’s audience and hoping it goes viral.
Substack is about finding people who already like the way you dance and performing for them.
Writers are on Medium because they are willing to play the algorithm game in return for the possibility of a big payday, even if they don’t know when that payday will be. Medium is a numbers game, so writers over there know that if they pull the slot machine X times, they’ll get at least Y good results a month…
…but in order to have a good month, you have to feed the machine a bunch of articles.
Substack writers have already opted out of that game, though. In general, they have left other social media platforms and landed here because they are sick of playing the approval lottery.
In the approval lottery, if you say just the right thing at just the right time you will be flooded with new likes and views that somehow lead to money. Yes, you might lose that lottery 99% of the time, but you get just enough of a hit when you win to keep playing.
The Medium vs. Substack debate is interesting because it’s a bunch of Deserts (who are comfortable dancing for other people and molding their articles for the broadest audience) telling a bunch of Forests, who have a viscerally negative reaction to working that way, that something they naturally hate is a good idea.
If you’re not familiar with our Author Ecosystems framework, then just know that the classic debate is between Forests and Deserts, who sit on opposite sides of almost every issue in authorship and represent upwards of 70-80% of all authors.
Further reading:
On one side, you have Deserts…
Deserts are pliable creators who are good at writing to market and audience. They can make unemotional business decisions and can also ride a trend by delivering a solid experience for a broad audience to consume. When they find a trend they want to ride, they are usually very good at hitting the market at the right time and place. They also do a good job of doubling down on things that seem to be working, and tend to put all their chips on one square.
Meanwhile, on the other you have Forests…
Forests are often marching to the beat of their interests and putting their own unique spin on everything they do for their readers. They have a close relationship with their fans largely because they inject so much of their own personality into all their books. They could write a murder mystery, a sweet romance, and cozy comedy, and readers will gobble it up because it’s [insert name here]’s take on the genre!
While there are three other ecosystems (Grasslands, Tundras, and Aquatics), the industry discourse is dominated by these two types who have almost diametrically opposed success paths.
Basically, Deserts are very comfortable playing by the rules of the game (while stress-testing them as much as possible to get ahead) and using trends to boost their own work, while Forests succeed by cultivating readers who love their offbeat style.
Forests would rather flip the table than play a game they don’t think they’ll enjoying playing or think they can win.
Deserts often don’t even have a mailing list or social media presence because they just borrow other people’s audiences when they need to make a splash. Since their writing style molds to whatever is popular at the time, they can ride waves of popularity no matter the context.
As a rule, they are perfectly happy to serve other people’s audiences, like KU or Medium, as long as they can get in front of the most people.
Medium is the perfect situation for them, because they don’t have to curate an audience at all. They just need to know what the algorithm needs and what the audience wants. Then, they can write an article quickly that gets seen by a bunch of people without having to actually engage with anyone.
To them, that is fan service because they “serviced” the most “fans” on a given topic.
Nobody else thinks that way. For every other ecosystem, they use big audiences to funnel people into a collection of their own fans.
Access to a lot of people is not persuasive unless it’s the right people. Substack people don’t want big money at random intervals. They was sustainable money at predictable intervals, which is just not how Medium works at all.
Medium experts are having “make big money” conversations around people who don’t care about playing that game and it’s making them look like all they care about is money, which is the cardinal sin to a Forest.
The good news is that 30-50% of writers are Deserts, which means these Medium gurus have a good potential audience size, but they are still alienating 50-70% of their audience.
Monica and I made the same mistake, but in the opposite direction. We had an easy time talking to Forests, Tundras, Grasslands, and Aquatics, but we alienated Deserts because we talked about audience growth in ways that were antithetical to how they thought about sales and marketing.
Now, I’m watching a lot of Medium gurus pop up on Substack making the same underlying mistake and facing similar backlash because they are fundamentally having the wrong conversation with Substack people.
You would think that a lot of Deserts (or Grasslands) would be on Substack, but in my experience, Forests dominate this platform, and your argument is a terrible one to persuade them to integrate Medium into their business (if you can even convince them they have a business).
Making more money is not persuasive because Forests believe they will have to change their own unique writing to succeed on Medium. Forests would rather not succeed at all then to succeed in a way that forces them to change their style.
Moreso, their unique style is exactly why they succeed, so you are asking them to fundamentally alter their biggest sales and marketing advantage.
That output grind, tho…
Now, let’s examine how these gurus talk about output. If there’s one thing they get wrong more than money and audience, it’s how they talk about the writing output itself.
Most Medium gurus seem to think it’s pretty easy to write a great article, and it just might be for Deserts. Because they are trend chasers, a Desert can catch a wave and jump to the next thing at any time. Every time they ride a new trend, they can bring out the same tricks on repeat and new audiences will gobble them up.
If you have to write the same, or similar, 30 articles every month, then it gets increasingly easy to write them well.
The other ecosystems aren’t like that. They tend to have 1-2 topics/themes that sit on for their whole career. They have no use for the traditional way Deserts think about virality because they are not chasing trend waves.
Instead, they want to find a nice, mature topic/theme and ride it to hell.
Because of how they think about writing, it takes Forests a lot of time and effort to craft an article that resonates deeply enough with them to release and have real problems “whipping up a simple article” that goes viral. Unlike Deserts, they generally will never go viral because their work is not written to be easily consumable to the broadest possible audience. It’s meant to be deeply resonant with their chosen niche audience.
Additionally, since they are not changing trends quickly or often, they also aren’t writing the same article every time, either. Instead, they have to find new ways into the same topic, a topic they have often been mining for years. Do you know how hard it is to get blood from a stone? It’s even harder to keep making the same topic feel fresh for a decade.
Deserts are chameleons who can disappear into whatever the trend needs (which is why publishers love them) while Forests are more peacocks whose expressive uniqueness allows them stand out in a crowd.
From this comparison alone, you should be able to see why a Desert would preference a content-led platform like Medium where they can blend into the background while a Forest would prefer a creator-led platform like Substack where they can preen and display their plumage.
By the time a Desert is bored of a topic and on to the next one, a Forest has barely gotten started. This is because Deserts write at the beginning of a trend cycle, while Forests write at the end of it, which leads to very different types of articles.
One of the most interesting parts about the Author Ecosystems is what we’re calling the “Trend Cycle”, which looks like this:
Aquatics start doing something interesting that gets traction with an audience.
Grasslands notice that traction and start trying to figure out what is happening. Once they have it figured out, they start moving the industry toward it.
Deserts see the massive arbitrage in a trend and start building the market for it until it finds equilibrium.
Tundras seek out the evergreen trope in a trend and maximize it for profit and efficiency.
Forests enter a mature market and twist stale trends to breath new life into them.
Aquatics start the cycle again.
Because they write toward the beginning of the trend cycle, Deserts don’t have to dig deep to make articles interesting. Often, it’s enough to report on a trend to serve their purpose, with a lot of collating and general baseline education. Especially when they write for publishers, mostly what they’re asked to do is regurgitate the same types of stories in slightly different ways to hit new audiences.
Deserts are a walking, talking Buzzfeed listicle. Forests are an Atlas Obscura database. Buzzfeed listicles are buzzy and popular, but there is not much longevity to them. An Atlas Obscura database is niche, but it gains value over time with the right audience.
Once the trend is over, Deserts know they can just move onto the next one and pull the exact same tricks, getting more efficient at them over time. This is one reason why it’s so easy for Deserts to pound out articles. Once Deserts find the formula, they can stick with it forever while a Forest would rather burn the formula with their own flaming carcass than use it.
I love me a good listicle something fierce, but there’s no doubt it’s easier to follow a general paint by numbers style every time you need a boost than to do the deep research to make an Atlas Obscura article compelling, especially when there might only be 10 people in the world who care about it.
Forests, in contrast, write at the end of a trend cycle, into a mature market that already knows (and are often bored by) the underlying rules, so they have to find more complicated and nuanced ways into a topic that’s already been written about a thousand million times before, and come up with new ways the utilize their unique perspective that feels fresh for readers who have often been with them for a long time.
Their job isn’t to get people excited for a trend. It’s to rekindle their love of a trend that feels stale. People come to Forests because of the point of view they bring to their topic, and the themes they return to over time.
This is why sustainable, predictable revenue is really important to a Forest. They might not have a lot of them, but once they find a fan they tend to stick around for a long, long time. Comparatively, a Desert fan only sticks around until they jump trends and/or styles.
By the time a fan finds a Forest, they have probably read a ton in a genre/topic/theme (and are probably burnt out on it). Forests keep the flames burning for these fans because of how the twist tropes and create new experiences.
To do that well, it just takes more time to drag out their own point from the morass. They can’t write 25+ articles a month because they spend too much time on any one article and they spend too much time because their articles are complex, nuanced, and formed from a specific point of view for an audience that already is spun up on all their tricks.
Think about a beat reporter vs a columnist. A beat reporter is responsible for the who, what, where, when, why and how of an event. The columnist is responsible for bringing a unique perspective to the news.
What Deserts lack in uniqueness and depth they make up for in volume. It takes a lot of listicles to keep Buzzfeed going, and Deserts can pound them out as fast as an algorithm needs them, which is a very useful and necessary skill. Meanwhile, Forests focus on producing a singular article that will excite their little corner of the writing world.
Both strategies probably take roughly the same time and energy, but they are wholly different and disparate skills.
So, when Medium gurus come to Substack and tell a bunch of writers who take a week (or much longer) to finish an article because they need it to resonate deeply with their chosen audience for anyone to care, and tell them to just whip up a bunch of articles and let the algorithm do its money magic…
…well, it shows they have zero idea who they’re talking to, and they kind of look foolish. It’s okay. We did it, too, and it caused us to waste a ton of time.
Now, I know that Medium gurus are gonna say something like “But that’s not even true. You can write whatever you want and get boosted”, which…whether any of that is true about Medium or not, that is the perception. So, you have to break that block first, and none of you are making a persuasive argument to the dominant ecosystem on Substack.
If you instead want to know how to persuade people on Substack that Medium might be a good choice for them, you should be talking about how to retain your voice and get the attention of boost nominators, building relationships with publications, finding a community, and show them how to carve out a cozy little hole for themselves that nurtures them as a writer, or at least showing them how to build a funnel from Medium to Substack while making money doing it.
Or at least how to get out of their own head and write a 500 word article that doesn’t require agonizing over every word.
I’m willing to be convinced that Medium is an effective addition to my ecosystem, but I’m not interested in dancing for random people and having to be “approved” by nominators to eat my dinner.
While I’m a Tundra with very strong Forest tendencies, I am actually very, very jealous of the way Deserts think about the world and try hard to embrace that part of myself as frequently as possible.
It’s very hard and getting out of your own way probably comes easily to you. It is a constant struggle for me to stand aside and let money happen.
I’ve historically eschewed making my work easily consumable to my detriment, leaving tons of money on the table from readers who would have otherwise gleefully given me money to support my work.
So, in 2024 I committed myself to taking better advantage of trend cycles as often as possible and trying to write (some) easily consumable and shareable articles to expose myself to bigger audiences instead of always taking the harder path for myself.
(Not this article, or course. I am way out in left field with this one.)
Whether they resonate with writing on Medium or not, I think all Forests would do well to learn how to create low-barrier-of-entry articles with mass appeal to ease people into their often complex universes that might otherwise scare readers away. Not all the time, mind you, but having a few easily accessible entry points into your work ready when new people to find your work wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I am learning to love the Desert inside me more with every day. So, I’m very gettable in a way I haven’t been before to these arguments coming from Medium gurus.
That said, everything I have heard about Medium makes me hate it more, and every post I’ve read meant to get me excited about Medium instead makes me want to run away screaming.
Far from convincing me that I should give Medium a go, all that these gurus have successful done is get me to hide a bunch of their posts and Notes because I can’t even with them. I don’t think that I’m the only one which can’t be good for anyone, especially you.
What do you think?
Is Medium something that makes sense to you?
Are you making any money on Medium? If so, how?
Can using both be an effective strategy?
Let me know in the comments.
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Where to go next:
Hadn't noticed any of this discourse taking place, but your breakdown of the cultures that have built up around each platform is fascinating. And tallies with my general experience.
Two related thoughts come to mind:
1. The 'Desert' approach is at particularly high risk of being usurped by generative AI. The rapidity of Deserts' output ceases to be a USP. The formula/trend-chasing style is easily replicable: by definition, a trend has a lot of data that can be used with an AI to constantly rechurn variants of that trend.
2. Writing for platforms with models like Medium (or indeed anything from Meta, X etc) has increasingly felt to me like you're a badly treated employee of theirs: you're beholden to their business decisions, have no control over your fate (other than to leave, which in itself is a huge risk) and (this is the worst bit, obviously) you might not even get paid.
The unpredictability of Medium is what pushed me out of it several years ago (before I knew about Substack). Subtack, on the other hand, gives me a predictable foundation I can build on. Any success or failure that comes is much more of my own doing.
I haven't seen the (bad) Medium pitches yet and I have a lot to say on this, but I'll keep it short here because I'm on my phone right now 🤣: The biggest problem/danger is that writers/creators attach themselves too much to platforms. If you want to make a living by sharing your message online, you have to eventually think beyond a single platform. Doesn't mean you have to publish content on several platforms, but it means you have to think of your work as a *business* and ensure you can keep doing what you do even if a platform doesn't exist anymore.
Most people ask the wrong questions when trying to decide where to start or what platform to use. It's not a matter of finding a goldmine but a matter of building a business that allows you to do what you want to do in a sustainable and reliable way.