On May 27, 2013, I wrote and published my first blog post at Medium. Designed in Toronto by Teehan+Lax, Medium made writing look and feel like it was

8 Lessons from 8 Years of Writing at Medium

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2021-06-10 11:00:07

On May 27, 2013, I wrote and published my first blog post at Medium. Designed in Toronto by Teehan+Lax, Medium made writing look and feel like it was worth your attention. Especially if a person didn’t blog regularly, Medium gave them a place to tell their stories. A lot of things have changed over the years, but one thing hasn’t: over eight years and 168 posts later, and I’m still writing at Medium.

There are many reasons for me to keep publishing at Medium: over 10,000 people have chosen to follow my work there. Also, thanks in no small part to its editorial team, I’ve written some of my favorite work at Medium’s publications, like this piece covering how to make money at YouTube for Marker, or this piece on reclaiming time for creativity for Forge. Like I told Jeff Sarris, I made a few thousand dollars directly from writing at Medium in 2020—the equivalent to a small book advance. Outside of Medium, I also started and led an editorial studio, I independently published a book that I’m now revising and publishing with Holloway, and I even worked as a staff writer for Lifehacker, writing 176 posts for it in a few months.

During these years, Medium grew up too. According to SimilarWeb, Medium received a whopping 204.5 million pageviews to its platform in April 2021. (For comparison, Lifehacker got 12.4 million.) If you want a detailed history, Laura Hazard Owen did a great job documenting it here. In particular, I loved the way she phrased her conclusion:

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