Which platform best rewards commitment over the long term?

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly dissatisfied and disinterested with Medium, and have decided to focus my efforts toward building a Youtube channel instead.

It’s not that I haven’t seen some good results on here. Back in September of last year I had my best month ever, bringing in over $170.

Mind you, this was accomplished mostly with an article that wasn’t even published on any major publications. My article “Why I Don’t Drink Alcohol” has brought in $213.43 and almost 2,000 views to date, 90% of which were organic internal views.

I didn’t even have that many followers to help kickstart my article’s views. And the article barely got any views the first two weeks before blowing up later. This proves that Medium has a quality algorithm so that even articles with no publication promotion, and written by writers with only a small following can still get traction.

Medium is a great platform for the most part. I have no intention of leaving for good. It’s just that I think my efforts would be better rewarded on YouTube in the long term. Medium seems to have a low upper limit of success and income. Even if you’re a writer with tens of thousands of followers, you’re unlikely to realistically make more than a few thousand dollars a month sustainably.

Whereas, there are many, many people on YouTube making many times more than that.

Here are a few more reasons why I’m switching to YouTube over Medium for my content creation going forward:

Content Diversity

It’s no surprise YouTube has vastly more content than Medium, as the platform is open to everyone to use. You can find everything from academic lectures, to video essays about Batman, to just some guy who has a channel of nothing but videos of him drinking water.

Medium seems to be a place devoted to subjects like digital marketing, side hustles, and the occasional personal story.

I find myself on YouTube way more than Medium. In fact, I only passively check Medium from time to time, and usually I find the same sorts of articles again and again.

Content is Going Video Anyway

The written word is never going away. People will always be attracted to strong writing, either on the web or in printed form. But there’s no question there’s a growing preference anymore for video over blogs and articles. I find myself consuming information more through podcasts and videos over static articles on the web.

YouTube also has tons of audiobooks, if you prefer fiction instead.

You Can Build a Bigger Audience With Video

There are some people with tens of thousands of followers, and even hundreds of thousands of followers here on Medium. Those are great numbers, and having a big Medium following is a great accomplishment. But I can’t help but think if all the hard work that lead to those figures wouldn’t have been better put on YouTube instead. That guy I mentioned earlier who posts videos of himself drinking water? He has over 70,000 subscribers.

Sure, you can argue that videos of yourself drinking water is low effort content and not the same as a deep ten-minute article on the philosophical implications of AI, but numbers are numbers. I see other writers posting regularly about deeply important issues that don’t have even one tenth the followers as the “internet’s premier water drinking series.”

Better Engagement

When is the last time you saw an article with hundreds, or even thousands of comments? Never? I see videos of all kinds with immense comment engagement. Sometimes even on videos with few relative views.

Moving on from the humorous example of Jon Drinks Water, let’s look at a Youtuber I enjoy listening to regularly, and who posts the types of content you might see here on Medium, to see what I mean about engagement.

Martin Goldberg posts faceless videos talking about a range of subjects, but generally about society, culture, gender relations, politics, and other opinion and commentary type stuff. His style is like the soft-spoken “smart friend” who always has interesting and witty insights to share. His latest video talking about Vivek Ramaswamy only has 3,600 views, but has 107 comments as of right now. By constrast, my alcohol article has 2,000 views, but only 8 comments.

While I’m very appreciative of any comments or engagement on my articles, as well as for my 398 followers, it’s clear that if you’re interested in reach and engagement, YouTube is the way to go.

Medium is Strictly Leftist

My personal politics is hard to pin down and I’m agnostic about a great many issues. There are some things I agree with on the left and the right. But overall, I tend to fall on the conservative and traditionalist side of things.

Well, this is not the case with Medium whatsoever, which is largely left wing, very feminist, socialist, and generally hostile to anyone outside whatever is considered “progressive” or “woke.” In fact, I’ve seen conservative writers I’ve liked banned for seemingly no reason, even after building an audience in the thousands.

While I’m not an overtly political person or writer — I tend to avoid politics for the most part in my articles—I’m not a strictly technical writer either. Obviously one’s world view and mindset is going to bleed through the edges when writing about different topics. Medium isn’t friendly toward voices outside what I’d call the deep blue “metropolitan sophisticate” cohort who unquestionably embrace the DIE (diversity equity inclusion)/ BLM/CRT/LGBTQ+/ and whatever other leftist belief system you want to throw in there. Browsing Medium is sometimes like hearing a chorus of programmed NPC automotons. I don’t think people in that narrow mindset realize how exclusionary they really are, even while supposedly being all about “inclusivity.”

It’s not to say conservative media is any better. In fact, I think it’s largely godawful and cringe. And don’t even get me started on the “red pill” weirdos.

Increasingly, I value originality and voice, even if I may disagree with the politics of the content creator. I think maintaining a strict political mindset crushes creativity in many ways, whether you’re on the left or right.

YouTube may have issues with censorship in some cases, but for the most part it has the kind of diversity where it matters — in thought and opinion.

For example, just recently I discovered a YouTube channel called “the radical center,” created by a woman who talks about ideological bias in her academic experience. Her channel has the kind of content that would largely be a no-go here at Medium. But with just 86 videos, she’s amassed over 15,000 subscribers, and very active engagement. Something I doubt would happen here. Her latest video has only 1,500 views but 93 comments.

YouTube Offers Better Income Opportunities

Over the past months, I’ve covered a few YouTube channels in my “Niche Knowledge” series. You can make a living doing almost anything on YouTube — talking about comic books, sharing updates on cryptocurrency, making copyright-free music, or talking about controversial figures like Andrew Tate. Not necessarily the case on Medium, which again, seems more focused on things like digital marketing and “city professional” stuff.

And again, while I occasionally hear about people making $10k or so on here, those days seem to mostly be in the past.

I’m Tired of Hitting the Google Lottery and Having Nothing To Show for It

You’d think with me making this big case against Medium that I’d be some disgruntled writer who barely gets reads. On the contrary. Not only am I not disgruntled, I’m not even gruntled.

I routinely get anywhere between 60–75 or so hits daily on my articles, with no promotion or any real effort on my part. About a month ago, on May 9th, I even got almost 1,000 views in one day for my article “Three People Who Destroyed Their Lives in Less than 60 Seconds.”

The problem is virtually ALL of those views were external. On Medium, you only make money when other paying members view your stories, or people buy something through your affiliate links.

Now, it’s not Medium’s fault if a story does not click with an internal audience. If anything, this example shows Medium’s value in helping your articles rank in Google for different key words and topics. But what’s the point of that if any time an article hits the Google algo it doesn’t translate into actual dollars? At best all I’m doing is increasing Medium’s digital footprint, and increasing awareness of the site to other people, for free. At worst I’m short changing myself. Had that article been hosted exclusively on a website, or made into a YouTube video instead, those views might have meant actual dollars.

The majority of my regular daily traffic is external. I know that because my partner earnings increases by pennies. If over the course of a month I’m getting 2000–3,000 views or more, something like 95% of that is external, and therefore goes unmonetized. If a typical ad rate impression for a website or Youtube is around $10 RPM, then that means I’m potentially missing out on around $30 in revenue. That’s pretty small, but supposing in a year I’m getting 10,000–15,000 views a month, and it can start to really add up.

YouTube has its downsides too, in the interest of fairness. You still need 4,000 watch hours and a minimum of 1,000 subscribers in order to monetize your channel. And like almost any other platform out there, you’ve got to be put in the work and upload regularly if you want to see any results. Some niches pay more than others. Most of the higher paying ones, like dropshipping, affiliate marketing, finance, and others, are not areas I’m interested in covering. They are also hyper competitive.

Then there’s the fact that video is a different medium of information, and requires a much steeper learning curve. I can put together an article in under an hour. But shooting and editing a video properly takes time, and a good bit of knowledge. Youtube is more competitive now, and I think viewers are more demanding and discerning now than even just a couple of years ago. If you want to produce professional-looking videos but don’t have any editing skills, it’s expensive to hire a good editor. I’m not talking about AI-voiced “cash cow” video editors, either. I mean the ones who can put together videos you may actually want to watch, and convey worthwhile content. Over on Fiverr I see them usually starting at a few hundred dollars and up.

However, despite the challenges of the video medium, I’ve already seen some results on my Youtube channel. Over the last few months I’ve been mostly turning my Medium articles into faceless YouTube videos with some V.O. and either copyright-free or fair use imagery. A few weeks ago, out of nowhere, my video “Hot Blonde Bimbo Teachers Can’t Stop Banging Kids,” a video version of my article, “Hot Blonde Bimbo Teachers Can’t Stop Fucking Kids” about Marka Bodine, got over 7,000 views in a matter of days.

That video brought in about 24 subscribers, bringing my current total number of YT subscribers to 32. That’s pretty small, I realize, but again, all I’ve been doing is sporadically uploading video versions of my Medium articles. Obviously, I’m not monetized yet. But small successes like this are very encouraging. I posted that video back in November. It took until this May before it got any traction. And that was purely algo-driven. I did not promote my video anywhere, or pay for views or anything. But if that’s the kind of results you can potentially get with no promotion or efforts to build SEO, imagine what you could do if you took YT really seriously. Video essays and humorous commentary on news topics tend to do really well.

In summary, I’m going to focus on making content exclusive to YouTube because I see much more long-term upside on there rather than on Medium. I’ll still going to post here once in a while, but it will be more off-the-cuff type stuff, or announcements.

I still think there’s opportunity on Medium, if you’re a certain kind of writer, and you write for a certain type of audience. But I think YouTube offers opportunities for virtually all audience types and interests. It can also prove to be a great platform for fiction writers like myself. There are many writers who use YouTube as a platform to help sell their books.

I’m certainly not a YouTube personality or a professional video editor by any means. I’m not the best at verbal communication, which is something I’m trying to improve. Except for a few videos I don’t even show my face. I think it will be a challenge to get serious traction on YT, as it would be anywhere else. But in the end I think it will be worth it.