Writers, rejoice: There's a “YouTube for articles” — and that website can help you both grow your audience and make more money along the way.
I'm talking about Medium.com, a free, open-source publishing platform established in 2012. When leveraged well, Medium can help you get seen online, attract ideal readers, and even make money in the form of royalties on your writing.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll go through how Medium works as a platform, along with everything I did in my first year on Medium to accelerate results.

“It shaved years off my learning curve”
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Table of Contents
Example Results on Medium
I began writing on Medium because I was tired of using other social media platforms to try and promote my expertise. These social media platforms felt crowded, and it was hard to break through. It was also hard to attract people who actually wanted to read things, rather than just scroll.
In my first year on Medium, I attracted a little over 220,000 views to my articles.

30-day traffic numbers for every month in 2020.
I also brought in a net gain of over 3,600 new email subscribers to my list by offering a freebie at the end of my articles and having the right strategy.

Email subscriber growth in 2020. Gross growth: 4,742 subscribers. Net: 3,600.
At the time, when readers subscribed, I offered them a limited-time discount for one of my mini-courses. I put one in place about halfway 2020, and another one in place near the end of the 2020.
Together, these made $10,714, and once they were all set up I didn’t have to lift a finger to fulfill. We like this!

Monthly revenue numbers for every month in 2020 off of "limited-time offer" email signup offers. Two different offers each had two checkout link options — four screenshots in all.
My favorite result, however, is that when you put your articles behind a paywall on Medium, you are paid based on member reading time from Medium’s $5/month paying subscribers. You can share paywalled articles with your non-Medium audience for free using something called “friend links”, which we’ll get into in part five.
With Medium, you can get paid and grow your email list at the same time. In 2020, my first year on the platform, Medium paid me $7,685.98 to grow my list.

Payouts from the Medium Partner Program in 2020.
Most of that money went back into my business. I did also splurge and use some of it as fun money to buy a Nintendo Switch, which made pandemic living a little more tolerable.

Medium: A great platform for funding your midlife crisis
I actually didn’t make much progress in those first three months, because I was making critical mistakes. I probably left thousands of dollars and subscribers on the table in this first year as a result.
What Makes Medium Unique
People hate on Medium, but that’s because they don’t know how to use it correctly.
Most people think of Medium as a blog where they can self-publish their writing in lieu of a website. Although Medium can be used for that -- and millions of people who want to write do so every month -- some articles get way more views than others.
- There are different curation techniques you can use to ensure a post gets distributed over and over again on Medium’s platform and in Medium’s daily emails to subscribers, giving you more visibility than a Wordpress website. These are called curated posts.
- There are user-owned publications that have large followings and will let you publish your work with them. Some of them will also let you self-promote. Publications are a great growth driver.
- Comments on content do not influence article distribution. This one is big. It means the quality and value of your writing determines how well you get distributed, not popularity, which is how things are on social media. Medium is a great platform for people who have something thoughtful to say.
Also, since Medium’s design is very clean, you don’t have to compete with super fancy brands, video creators, or thirst trap images. Readers don't expect fancy stuff here. The platform is designed for writing and publishing to shine.

Screenshot of the Medium interface. Words are the star.
Medium is a terrific platform. In this supersized guide, we'll go through everything you need to know to get started.
What Is Medium?
Medium was founded in 2012 by former Twitter founder Ev Williams as a way for people to start writing and publishing updates that were longer than 140 characters. Williams recently stepped down, and was replaced by current CEO Tony Stubblebine in 2022.
One reason professionals are confused about Medium is that it’s changed a lot over the last few years.
- From 2012-2015, the site operated mainly like a digital magazine.
- In 2017, Medium introduced a membership paywall and uses its paywall earnings to incentivize and pay writers to create quality content.
- The last audience size number given publicly by Medium was 60 million readers, but that was in 2016. It’s estimated today that Medium has over 100 million readers.
In recent years, Medium has also become the vehicle of choice by various celebrities, politicians, and big thinkers to tell their stories or make official statements.
For example, here’s a post from U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris sharing about the economy.

And here was a post from influencer Chrissy Teigen sharing about a grief-stricken personal experience.

There are also successful authors who use Medium regularly. Laura Vanderkam, a bestselling author, writes regularly on Medium.

Susan Orlean, also an award-winning author who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 2003 film Adaptation, also writes on Medium.

Medium Has a High Domain Authority
The SEO company Moz created a metric called domain authority to help users measure the likelihood that a search engine like Google or Bing will rank a certain page of a website. This score is not the only factor in ranking search engine results, but it does help to measure the “health” of a website.
If you choose to write on Medium instead of, say, your own blog, you’ll be able to “piggyback” on Medium’s high domain score. For example, here was the domain authority of my website at the time I started writing on Medium, a piddly 30 out of 100.

Here is the same domain authority score for Medium.com: a whopping 95 out of 100. That ranking is even higher than major media publications like Entrepreneur and Fast Company.

In terms of visibility, your post usually has a better shot of being seen by new eyeballs when it’s published on Medium. It can rank in search engines. Some posts get picked up by Google Discover as well.
I would have never been able to achieve that if I had published the same piece on my own blog, because my domain authority is too low. Medium, on the other hand, has enormous domain authority.
Usually, writing for websites with a high domain authority is a challenge. I write for Entrepreneur and Fast Company, and to write for these sites, I have to pitch every article. A lot of pitches get turned down, and if a pitch is accepted, I wait two to six weeks for it to get published.