Comparing Substack with Medium
A June, 2022 Perspective
Hey Guys,
I wanted to compare my experience with Substack vs. Medium. There’s a lot of potential observations to make here, and granted I haven’t written on Medium in quite some time.
There’s a really easy and quick way to understand the difference:
Substack
Professional writers
Highly targeted Niche
Not algorithmic
Discovery: Recommendation feature has a high ceiling
SEO is weak.
Perk: Complete freedom/No censorship, community is more positive since it’s more new.
Since you have to work to reach your audience on Substack, I noticed it’s far more enjoyable (If you like a challenge) as a process of growing your personal brand and your body of writing.
Growing paid subscriptions is hard!
Medium
Amateur writers
You can write about anything, blogging canvas
Highly algorithmic with human editors
Discovery: Networking matters and so does going “viral”.
SEO is exceptionally strong.
Perk: It feels like a large community.
Con: You don’t technically own your Medium content or your follower list there.
Monetization
It isn’t typically easy to earn money on Medium, unless you are a top writer. It’s also a bit of a content-mill you have to keep producing to the point that soon it stops making sense.
On Substack you can share a mix of paid and free posts and slowly build your audience, which can scale over years to considerable sums if you know what you are doing and are passionate about your niche.
I would say Substack has higher long-term potential for monetization, for a number of reasons. Sure they take 10% and Stripe takes 3%, but even 200 paid subscribers amounts to a good sum and that’s every month.
Given that many Substack Newsletters are just weekly posts, that’s exceptional ROI. On Medium it can be a hit-and-miss opposite, you might find yourself frustrated with the journey and discouraged as an amateur writer wondering if you will ever “make it”.
The Deal Breaker
Substack’s emphasis on creating a holistic Creator “stack” is really appealing to me, here are reasons why it’s more sticky:
Podcasting and audio content, it’s more immersive and allows you to connect better on a personal level with your audience.
No Censorship, Substack has a policy where you could write about anything, and for the most part it’s okay.
Substack is Younger, as a newer platform (it doesn’t even have a mobile android app yet), the product/engineering team is significantly more motivated. This ends up as a better UX, product and set-up for Creators.
Substack Takes out the Middle Man: since you relate one to one with your audience, it’s a more much viable feeling.
Slow Twitch vs. Fast Twitch: Substack is typically weekly Newsletters with added features, it’s not the hectic content-mill feeling of Medium or other “soul crushing” social media spam.
Leadership: It all boils down to corporate leadership in the end, Substack’s leaders seem more chill and focused where Medium’s leadership is a never-ending drama. This has unfortunately impacted the Engineering and product level at Medium.
Gamification vs. Ownership
Substack’s community also feels less “political” than Medium. Medium’s internal paywall really makes it less enjoyable and doesn’t feel open or free. I remember years of dreading or hoping I would get “featured” and it felt too gamified and like a gig-economy exploitative vibe.
So while this is only my opinion, generally speaking I’d say that Substack is more focused on building an authentic “ownership model” where Medium is hyper-gamified by an algorithm and trying to impress human editors and write clickbait in a dated system that was influenced by Ad-based platforms that try to squeeze value from the user, often a desperate writer.
While I wrote on Medium I felt pressure to “keep producing” and go “viral” which was pretty toxic. To this day, you can tell if someone wrote on Medium by how they write. On Substack, while I put pressure on myself to grow, the slow-twitch nature of Newsletters means the emphasis is more on quality than quantity, more on showcasing quality than crying for attention, if you know what I mean. It’s a pretty noticeable difference.
Advertising
While Substack is about getting away from Ads and social media hypocrisy in general, some writers on Substack Newsletters do feature “corporate sponsor” bylines in their Newsletter which can be yet another source of income.
I have personally never done this, but if it can enable a Creator to keep working on their Substack, it’s a viable path that exists. On Medium this would be against their TOS, so my conclusion is you don’t really own your Medium profile or your work there.
On Substack, I feel the ownership level and feeling is very high. Obviously that’s more immersive for a Creator.
For this reason I’d recommend many amateur writers on Medium, to build a Substack portfolio in a methodical way in a highly targeted niche that professionals or the curious, might want to pay for.
Indie Media Solo Entpreneurs
Since on Substack you can literally have 10 Newsletters, and those Newsletters can have multiple “columns” at the top, you can essentially create your own media startup. Let’s say you have ten Newsletters and 5 Columns, that’s essentially 50 niches. Let’s say you team up with a couple of friends, you’ve just literally created a media startup.
The 10% they take is much better than Web2 platforms and the majority of other Creator sharing structures. It has to be high enough that they can, can afford to create a robust “Stack” of features for Creators.
So if you are motivated to freelance and have a viable side-gig, Substack is becoming quite a good offering.
Substack with paid subscriptions, in-Newsletter sponsor and other things like Podcasts, can become your viable full-time job one day. I would never say the same thing about being a Medium writer or influencer. This lack of sustainability on Medium is problematic. Medium can be fun, but it doesn’t feel like running your own side-gig or media startup.
So in conclusion, it’s not even a fair comparison. Furthermore the current articles on the web comparing Medium and Substack have no idea what they are talking about and are generic af. As someone that has spent a considerable amount of time writing, over 5,000 blog articles now, my vantage point is a bit unique.
Will I ever make on Substack how much I made on Medium? Well I’ll let you know as my journey continues.
Further Reading
This is all off the top of my head. I hope you have found it somewhat useful. If you can create a Substack that someone can “discover”, it will feel way more special than just being one of the viral articles of the week on Medium. The reward disappears immediately, and you feel somewhat used.
Medium had 145.6 million monthly views in May, 2022.
Substack had 32.6 million monthly views in May, 2022.
So Medium is getting a little less than 5x the traffic of Substack. But not all traffic is created equally.
This is based on the chrome-extension offered by SimiliarWeb. You might say that Substack has less competition, even if somewhat weaker SEO.
I’m not just talking from personal experience here:
One of the better (more viral) articles on this in recent weeks is this one:
We might consider Tomas one of the better case-studies of Medium writers who made the switch to Substack and has never looked back. He now has well over 1,000 paid subscriptions.
In the article he goes on to state some of the obvious:
Medium as an Aggregator play
Substack as a SaaS model
Substack more about the Personal brand and Individual
Medium more about its own App (trapping the Creators into an algorithmic system)
Medium has significant control and a crushing Terms of Service
Substack leaves you more free with no censorship
Medium has more traffic but not high quality
Substack has more targeted traffic via their recommendation system
Medium is about clickbait and getting attention
Substack is about building a relationship with your audience and inspiring them
Medium has a hard-ball monetization play and reminds us that without a direct relationship with their audience, authors can’t build a reliable business.
Substack while giving a product to “Professional writers”, now also offers ways to scale monetization such as Podcasting, Video (in beta) and networking via recommendations.
So while I had a good career on Medium once upon a time, it’s rather easy for me to assume that Substack is disrupting Medium and will continue to do so.
The main reason is of course it’s easier to monetize and more of a pleasure to Create in. It’s more entertaining because you actually own your Newsletter and how it empowers others.
Medium has its good points, but the toxic points are really bad. The years I participated on Medium felt soul crushing and I was left with nothing at the end of it. My first six months on Substack have been very different where I have space to not feel like I’m being exploited.
Going viral isn’t worth it, or being a gig-economy worker for cents to the page. But growing a reliable monthly side-gig feels amazing!
Substack is about disintermediation and the one-to-one relationship.
Medium is about being trapped by an algorithm that serves a platform.
Substack is a canvas that’s open to anyone, while Medium feels like being part of a clique of writers, a writer’s guild that’s in a perpetual state of failure.
Medium feels like an aggregation scam, while Substack feels like a publishing utopia.
Substack is decentralizing media with many media professionals and book authors joining it to augment their personal brand.
Medium is a centralized platform that has control over the users and their content.
So this for me is the early verdict in June, 2022 after spending many years on Medium, and just six months on Substack. It also just represents my opinion and experience.
At the end of the day it’s all about timing, I’m satisfied in how and when I participated on it during its lifecycle as a startup and I’m hoping my timing on Substack is similar in its growth curve.
There’s another simple reason to join a new place to write or app early on, people are just going to be a lot nicer sort of what you get with a brand new MMO video game. So hey if you want to get my Creator insights and tips, why not do it on Substack’s iOS app.
Last Words
So essentially in 2022 on Substack we are seeing:
More book authors serializing their chapters on Substack
More Creators learning and adopting Podcasting and grass-roots community building into their routines.
More Medium amateur writers “graduating” into Substack’s more hyper-niche value domain. Choosing the right niche is crucial.
Substack Creators getting a massive boost since mid April, 2022 from the Recommdantion feature, with in the area of 2.5x more free subscribers if they actively network with those in their niche. (This is my guess estimate)
More diverse Creators trying out Substack like TikTok “Internet Princess” RFQ who champions Mental health topics among other things.
Substack’s incredible evolution from a product/UX standpoint, where they add features on practically a weekly basis. Their care to detail is noticed.
As Substack’s entire architecture and ecosystem scales, so does ultimately the trickle down effect to new writers. While I was skeptical at first, I’m starting to see the beginning signs of this. So the win-win of being positive with other Creators, is a pretty significant incentive that creates a low-drama atmosphere on the whole.
Since they take 10% of Creator revenue, Substack employees have the right win--win motivation and incentives to help and empower writers to succeed. At Medium they have the traditional Silicon Valley ARPU model where they don’t actually care about you as a person.
Substack is creating meaningfully to the evolution of the Personal Brand *(in the so-called Creator Economy) online for writers, podcasters and others while promoting freedom of expression in general.
You practically have to be a journalism historian to understand what Substack is actually trying to do. But I’d suspect the corporate culture is pretty different from that of Medium, where employees both executives and engineers are basically like revolving doors due to their Venture Capital limitations and old-school thinking.
Otherwise behind the paywall I have many tips for professional writers on Substack, I hope to find ways to give actionable advice to other kinds of Creators as well in the near future.
Cheers!