Why I’m pivoting AWAY from Medium in 2025
I can’t tell you how much it hurts me to write this post, but I feel like it’s been a long time coming.
The past few days have cemented things for me.
Two and a half years ago, I stumbled onto this site as a complete nobody.
I was at a personal rock bottom, having just decided to quit drinking after pissing away some 15 years of my life.
My account of that descent and rebirth was one of the first things I ever wrote here.
I knew I had wasted so much potential.
All my life I’d wanted to be an entrepreneur, and here I was at 40, sick, tired, and brimming with self-loathing.
As I looked ahead at what my life would become if I didn’t make a change, all I could do was cringe.
Twenty more years of commuter hell just to pay off a mortgage and probably die young?
Is this all there is?
I hated my job.
I hated myself.
So I sat down and pondered this question: “What am I good at?”
I’d been a writer my whole career, so I knew I was good at that.
But after two decades of writing for other people about stuff I found boring, I’d come to hate that too.
Still, I figured: “What the heck, I’ll take one more crack at it, and this time I’ll write what I want to write.”
My wife and I had tinkered around with a site called Medium early in the pandemic but quickly lost interest.
I decided it was time to check it out again.
This time, I fell in love.
Not only was the site super easy to use, it had a beautiful, simple interface, and it started paying you right away for your work.
And it paid well.
Enthused, I started writing almost every day and managed to build an impressive audience (now 30,000 followers strong).
I was a top 6% writer on the site within a couple of months and a top 1% writer within 6 months, and I’ve stayed near the top ever since.
I have been all-in on Medium for two and a half years.
But while I’ve continued to bring more and more eyeballs and subscribers to the site — 120,000 views this December alone — I’ve been rewarded with steadily declining pay that is now so low it has me wondering if being all-in was a big mistake.
Yesterday was the final straw for me.
Medium is hostile to top writers
Whereas a lot of platforms cater to their marquee names because those names drive an outsized amount of subscribers, traffic, and engagement, Medium seems to get more hostile toward its biggest writers every day.
And its biggest writers, in turn, have been walking out the door.
If I owned this site or if I were an executive overseeing this exodus of talent, I’d be freaking the F out.
And yet Medium seems indifferent … maybe even happy?
Not only that, it continues to bury the people who are still here.
The latest head-scratcher is the decision to move publication names and avatars ahead of writer names and avatars in the main feed.
It’s strange, isn’t it?
When I think about my early days on Medium, I think about the writers.
I’d open the app to read stories from people like Jason Provencio, Tim Denning, Michele Maize, Eve Arnold, and Hudson Rennie.
I couldn’t tell you what the publications they wrote for were called. Still can’t.
Now?
Denning barely writes here anymore, and Eve has tapered down too.
Hudson left a while ago, came back, and seems to have gone again.
Just this week, Jason wrote his own piece about how brutal the cuts to writer pay here have been and how he’s moving his efforts over to the site that’s currently eating Medium’s lunch: Substack.
The crazy thing is Medium was beating Substack at its own game with its incredible referral program, which it unexpectedly shuttered in September 2023.
What the powers that be seem to forget is that publications are just empty husks without great writers.
And great writers are fleeing.
This is beyond worrisome.
It’s an existential risk.
Is another massive pay cut coming?
Just for funsies, I calculated just how brutal the pay cuts have been for unboosted writing and put them in the chart below.