Medium Medium is an incredibly successful platform because it has built a huge community of readers and writers. Medium is considered a great platform for writing for many reasons.
But why do some world writers still not choose this platform but build their own blogs? Especially Vietnamese bloggers.
As a long-time user and follower of Medium platform, I will share about this platform and compare it with Ghost in some important aspects for a blogger (if you don't use Ghost, there are still other options).
Spoiler: The article is exclusive content, you will not be able to find similar content on the global internet. Enjoy the article!
A little introduction to Medium
Medium is a social network for writers or bloggers (different from Facebook or Twitter). This is a platform that focuses on writing, emphasizing the quality of each article's content. In fact, Medium is more like a community than a social network.
Medium pays you when your articles are “monetized” (similar to Youtube) but the profit share is from Medium’s total subscription revenue.
Interestingly, the founder of Medium — Evan Williams — is also the founder of Blogger (which Google bought), and also co-founded Twitter. You will see that the design thinking is quite similar and Medium is an improvement of Blogger after it was sold to Google.
Ghost learns from Medium about email newsletter sending feature.
You can create a complete blog with Medium
Medium used to only let authors publish on their own domain, but now you can use your own domain for your personal blog. You just have to pay for this feature monthly like you would for regular hosting.
To create a blog with Medium, you need to sign up for a Medium account and Upgrade account to Membership ($50/month or $50/year). Membership account benefits include:
- Unlimited access to all Medium articles (which is great for readers).
- Allows you to create a blog on your own domain (CNAME).
Medium allows you to customize the blog interface quite limited but enough to use like home page post layout, font, navigation menu.
You can configure Favicon, Logo, full SEO meta for your blog. In terms of design and SEO in general, it is completely sufficient.
So isn't Medium great for creating your own blog? Big enough brand to keep you committed for the long term?
In theory, you are right, but in reality, it is quite cruel. It is not what you think, please continue reading the article below. Medium is not ideal for creating your own blog, especially for Vietnamese users.
Medium is not suitable for Vietnamese users
There are 4 main reasons why most of the world's bloggers choose to blog on Medium:
- You can make money with content (affiliate, Medium Partner, Medium Membership Refer,…).
- Create a blog super fast and easy (free if not using CNAME — custom domain name)
- The quality readership is “ready-made” on the Medium platform.
- Great SEO thanks to Medium domain authority (but not anymore and depends on whether you use CNAME or not).
It seems quite ideal, but the actual application in Vietnam is the opposite. Let's analyze each of the following items:
It is very difficult for you to enable monetization because Medium requires you to have a linked Stripe account, while Stripe does not support Vietnam yet. Most of the time you will not be able to enable monetization.
Next, you can easily create a blog with Medium, but Medium often blocks Vietnam (even on the mobile app). You will not be able to log in to your Medium account to publish articles and even read membership articles on Medium without using a VPN.
Medium considers countries like Vietnam to be unprofitable because there are very few paying readers and writers do not speak English.
The readership available on Medium is huge, however you must know that your articles must be in English to attract this potential readership.
Medium's SEO factor is no longer so attractive, Medium has tightened its spam policy, the articles you publish on Medium will have to satisfy some quality conditions (such as many claps or comment interactions) for Medium to let Google index your article.
Medium limits content that is made available to third-party search engines, as well as Medium's native search and tag pages. The overwhelming majority of content that Medium will no longer be allowed to be indexed is what most people would consider spam, and the net effect will be more traffic to quality long-term content.
– About SEO and Medium – Medium
In addition, all links in your article, regardless of whether they use your own domain, are “nofollow”. This is extremely important for SEO internal linking and external linking.
Although CNAME but not completely separate from Medium brand, you will see Medium Logo and login Medium Dashboard in the navigation bar. In addition, Medium blog speed is super slow in Vietnam. If you have used Ghost, you will quickly be disappointed by Medium's page loading speed.
What is the best strategy when using Medium in combination with Ghost?
If you have chosen to use Ghost with customers in Vietnam, you do not need to care about Medium, because Medium blocks viewers from Vietnamese IPs as shared above. If viewers cannot access the blog (including you), then why do you write on Medium?
However, if you already have a personal blog Ghost and global (written in English) then you should publish it alongside Medium by adding Canonical Link because it does not affect your blog's SEO at all.
You should also publish using Medium’s domain for convenience. No need for subdomain or CNAME because you have prioritized SEO for your own blog.
Your blog's SEO is still strong, you still attract a huge audience on Medium Search (remember to optimize Medium search with tags).
This way, you can SEO your blog very well and have readers see your articles, and at the same time have backlinks to your blog. Lots of benefits.
You should also choose long articles to publish on Medium only, short articles will reduce your followers. You should know that Medium readers are paying people, so they demand high quality articles.
Not dependent on Medium, helping you to be comfortable and independent in your career. You should only consider Medium as a supplementary tool for content distribution because Medium often changes its policies (such as indexing articles) and risks BANNING your account if you accidentally violate the terms of use.
Conclusion…
Ghost has similar functionality, design, and development philosophy to Medium, making it a perfect alternative to Medium.
While Ghost doesn't have a built-in reader community like Medium, you still get traffic from Google search.
When you use Ghost, it's like you own Medium, not a Medium user.
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