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Robert Cooper
Robert Cooper

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Moving Away From Medium for Publishing Content?

Are people starting to migrate towards platforms other than Medium for their blog posts (especially programming/developer related)? I'm thinking of no longer posting to Medium since there seems to be some benefits of having my content elsewhere. Here are some of the pros and cons I see:

Pros

  • Lots of eyes on your post if they are part of a popular publication
  • Cool analytics related to your posts
  • Nice editor that auto-saves as you compose a post

Cons

  • Syntax highlighting does not exist (brutal for technical programming articles)
  • Comment system is weird (each comment is considered a "story")
  • Low engagement with audience (compared with Dev.to)

Anyone have thoughts on this topic?

Top comments (8)

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gsto profile image
Glenn Stovall

I think Medium is a fine too, but I wouldn't use it as my primary source of publication. Medium doesn't have a profitable business model and there is no guarantee they will be around in a few years.

Instead, I would opt to publish my content on a platform that I own, such as a WordPress or static site.

Then, you can syndicate your content. Medium lets you re-publish articles from your blog to their platform. (Click your account in the top right > Stories > Import a Story).

So I'd say: set up a platform you own, then syndicate onto other's platforms.

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robertcoopercode profile image
Robert Cooper

The thing with reposting content from your blog onto Medium is that there are two sources that have the same content, which penalizes your SEO.
The nice thing with Dev.to is that you can specify a canonical URL which tells search engine where the original version of your content lives and you don’t get an SEO hit.

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gsto profile image
Glenn Stovall

If you use the Medium import tool, it will add a canonical link for you: help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/...

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robertcoopercode profile image
Robert Cooper

I had no idea! Thanks for the info πŸ‘πŸΌ

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Adrian B.G.

I had a medium tech blog for 1 year. I am not a part of a publication (except my own). Because of my writing interests (which are not so popular), I did not have an advantage yet.
It helped me because it was a managed service, and I didn't want to invest resources in my blog.

Next year I will move away my domain to a self-hosted solution (probably with hugo and others).

Medium pros

  • managed service (hosting and everything)
  • comments/replies

My static blog pros:

  • I can add more technical UI addons
  • I can have my own theme
  • I will have better performance (medium is slow, being dynamic)
  • I will have nice stats too, with Google analytics (which is on medium too)

For the editor (and drafts) you can use grammarly.com or a google document, and then transform it to a markdown and publish it.

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robertcoopercode profile image
Robert Cooper

When I posted on Medium, I tried to get my articles published with popular publications (Hackernoon, FreeCodeCamp, CodeBurst) which has gotten me quite a lot of eyes on my articles. Medium analytics tells me I average around 800-1000 views a day across all my articles. My intention was to get more people to discover me through Medium so that I could eventually transition to a blog on my own website (similar to what you're planning).

Like you, I'll probably be adding Google Analytics to my personal blog when I get around to building it. However, I find the Medium analytics much nicer to analyze since the analytics data is beautifully presented compared to Google Analytics. I find it difficult to parse the pertinent data that is shown to me in Google Analytics.

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antonrich profile image
Anton • Edited

I discovered that medium is not the platform for dev posts.
Dev.to is better.

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