By the End of May, I’ll Be Leaving Medium for Substack
Ev Williams expressed his intentions to divest away from the platform, so I’m doing the same.
This is not a post I expected ever making… at least not this early, but it seems as though if I stick with Medium for the foreseeable future, I’m signing myself up for eventual failure.
If you are not aware, Ev posted an update recently on his intentions to completely divest from editorial on Medium, citing a lack of business sense in maintaining them as the platform’s userbase continues to grow while they remained stagnant. I’ve made some friends who worked on pubs such as OneZero and GEN, and they’re amazing talented people that I’m eager to read more from once they get their bearings elsewhere.
That aside, I’ve been put in such a tough bind where regardless of what I do, I’ll be ending up with less of what I had before. Views — and subsequently revenue — have been on the downswing since the beginning of 2021, which apparently tracks with Medium’s inability to grow last year in the thick of what has been a devastating pandemic to the media ecosystem overall. This left me with two choices: Either double-down and stay on Medium despite leadership showing little faith in it, or water the seeds of growth elsewhere while it is still possible.
Despite many great risks, I chose the second. The next chapter of my writing adventures will be on Substack, and as I transition everything from here to there (which will hopefully be done by the end of May), there are some things you should be aware of:
The first is that the quality and presentation of my posts shouldn’t change much — if anything, it’ll continue its normal track of improvement as it always has. Some writers get complacent when they’re afforded a more familial space such as a newsletter, but that’s not me — you’ll be getting the best regardless of what format it is delivered in.
The second is that I made a committment to keep everything accessible on my Substack free-of-charge. That doesn’t supplant the need for an actual income — if only to justify the labor-intensive nature of creating well-researched, highly-professional blogs — so I’m making a Patreon page where readers can voluntarily contribute however much they like to support me. I’ll post more details once the transition has been finalized.
The third and final, is I understand if anyone has qualms about signing up for a newsletter. For a long time, I was reticent to embrace that format because it had long been associated with annoying spam and just generally things you don’t want in your inbox — I’ve since fallen in love with a few such as Charlie Warzel’s dogs blog, Paul Tassi’s God Rolls, Grace Robertson’s blog on football (which yanks know as soccer) and more. If you prefer to enjoy blogs in the traditional way, my page is still there, but I implore you to give this format a shot — both for me, and for others who are sure to follow as Medium completely abandons the project of pursuing high-quality journalism.
On the backend, I’ll be taking the time to import my stories and carefully edit them so they fit the style of Substack — this is what I’m giving myself a two-month buffer for. After that is done, the Medium page will cease to be updated, and it’ll eventually be decommissioned.
This is my new page — there’s nothing there on it as the transition process will take a while. But it’s where you’ll see me post exclusively on as soon as we’re through with the month of May — sign-up for it if you so wish, and if not, it’s completely fine by me. I only ask that you have faith in my ability to deliver you what I always did on this platform, just on another.
