Wow, I got over 5,200 views and 2,300 reads for my first post on Medium a few weeks ago. That’s remarkable.
I’ve been aware of Medium for a few years now. Mainly, I would discover smart content on Medium which I might have found on Wired, The New Yorker, or A List Apart. The long-form content there seemed to resonate with me and I found myself being frequently being sucked in. It’s unclear what Medium is evolving into – a publication, a blogging platform, or something new – a platisure, as Jonathan Glick wrote in re/code.
However, debates about the future of online journalism aside, it’s clear that Medium is a beautiful, simple blogging platform. I’ve heard it described as “the best typewriter for the web.” Ev Williams developed and sold the blogging software Blogger to Google 10 years ago, and this is his vision for the next version of blogging (apart from founding a little company called Twitter in between).
I’ve been blogging on this site for over 6 years now, with a mix of articles on healthcare digital marketing, tech tips, and general digital commentary. This year, I decided to cross-post as an experiment to share select content with the widest possible audience. I posted a thought piece on content and social hubs on LinkedIn’s Pulse in February. It was professionally relevant and links to my LinkedIn profile. I got some solid attention and it’s a useful adjunct to my LinkedIn presence. But, I was keeping an eye out for a topic that would be of broader interest, somewhat entertaining, and suitable for Medium.
Last month I wrote a reminiscence about my time at CBS Records / Columbia House and the cycle I went through from vinyl records to CDs, to digital, and back to vinyl again. It was longer, focused on music (a broad interest topic if there ever was one), and tapped into the current resurgence of interest in vinyl records. I wrote it with Medium in mind.
Within a day the Medium post was noticed by the editors of Cuepoint, Medium’s music magazine. They approached me about publishing the post on Cuepoint, and of course I was happy to. The editors rewrote the headline and found some Columbia House artwork, but other than that didn’t touch the article. Cuepoint featured the article on their page and due to Medium’s algorithms that meant it showed up in lots of people’s Medium email digest.
The post took off. I started getting many Twitter alerts from tweet mentions of the post. As you can see from the chart the traffic peaked very quickly within days of appearing online. I’d estimate about half the views were generated from Medium native promotion, Cuepoint, and emails. The association with one article on Record Store Day led to another 300 views. There were other interesting referrers, like reddit.com/r/vinyl and some audio forums.
That’s the most reads on any article I’ve ever gotten since I started blogging. There are a host of reasons to own your own platform and have full control over your content like I do here. But, to gain a wider audience and get visibility piggy-backing on a intuitive and impressive platform like Medium is hard to beat.
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