Medium vs. Substack

If you are vanity publishing and just want to see your stuff on the web, it is very, VERY easy to get involved with. Of course, your writing is not likely to stand out if you don't have a clear plan. The more I use it, the more I like it. The user interface is extremely well-done. I kinda wish my WordPress-based blogs had editors that were that easy to use.

Incentivized

It's well-suited for a creative writer who is comfortable writing essays or short fiction. It's especially well-suited for writers who are focused on writing essays based on personal experiences. I'm not sure it has the tools at this point for someone who wants to serialize a novel or long-form non-fiction book. I'd like to see better multi-media tools for writers/content creators who are fluent in written and audio-visual methods of communicating.

Incentivized

• User-friendly interface and editing features
• Easy to categorize articles to ensure they are found
• Change tracker helps review changes before article is published.

Incentivized

• Content organization/discovery - really easy to search.
• Newsletter/email integration - by far better at previewing and delivering content than any other site.

Incentivized

• It can be harder to get your content seen as medium is a popular platform.
• It is still early days for us to track back success (traffic, rank etc) from posting to medium regularly. I hear tracking success outside vanity metrics can be hard for others too.
• I am yet to figure out how to create and add to magazines - these have the potential to be a good audience booster, but not too clear.

• It's really difficult when multiple people are editing the blog at same time. Some things change or get overwritten due to which have to reload the page multiple times. Would like to see an experience just like in Google docs.

Incentivized

By comparison, most online editors are clunky. The Medium editor is amazingly powerful and still easy to use.

Incentivized

We found the support desk of Medium to be really good. They are very focussed on customer service and are willing to go all out to help in every way they can. They are fast to respond and they are also very knowledgable at what they do. They know the importance of being customer-focused.

Incentivized

Medium is dirt easy to use. The hard part is figuring out if it is worth the effort to include it as part of our content-marketing strategy.

Incentivized

Medium is easy to use. It is easy to add highlights and emphasis in paragraphs. It is easy to add images and videos anywhere in your articles. It makes article writing fun and easy to share. Other products were more cumbersome and awkward to use or were more expensive to operate.

Incentivized

Substack is the DTC version of traditional blogging sites - you own everything, both upside, and risk, which appeals to me more. Compared to Blogger, the ability to monetize and site interface is night and day better. Compared to Medium, which I think has a better interface and content curation abilities, Substack's advertising and promotion of your work are much better because they don't rely on premium members like Medium - it can get very click-baity there.

Incentivized

• Making enough money to pay back the monthly subscription fee takes a long time to reach that level.
• I've gotten a lot more recognition for being an SME in many areas and have received more interest professionally.
• Writing enough articles that are also high enough quality to attract followers takes a lot of time out of my weeks.

Incentivized

• Takes much much less time to produce content that you can charge for. This wasn't doable before, or you'd have to build it yourself
• Substack has made it much easier for me to stay on top of ex-customer communications. I get repeat business more easily now.
• Substack's speed & ease mean I can offload content writing & distribution to others

Incentivized