| Nathan’s right here. I’ve held off on replying to Don’s question because I wanted to find the post I read by a guy (on his own blog and Medium) that spoke of a huge gain in readership by publishing on Medium over publishing on his own blog. I thought it was Zeldman, and maybe it was. Not sure. Anyway, here’s a piece on roughly the topic by Zeldman on his own blog and on Medium. Read the comment threads on both, including Ev William's. (He founded Medium, and co-founded Blogger and Twitter before that.) Kind of covers the waterfront of the debate. As it happens, I was invited early, by Ev, to write on Medium, but didn’t want to diminish my own blogging (and independent blogging in general) in the process. So I didn’t. And still haven’t. But here are some interesting rough stats… Daily readership of my blog at its peak in the early-mid ‘00s: ~ 20,000 Daily readership of my blog today: ~ 200 # of Twitter followers of @dsearls: 22,000 Average # of clicks a link on @dsearls gets: ~ 15 Those numbers are approximate because I have a terrible connection at the moment and can’t check. And they’re a bit unfair because I post far less today on my own blog than I did in the old days (when I posted many times per day). But my point is that the leverage of blogging and even tweeting isn’t what it used to be. It helps, as it always has, to have a big publisher with a big built-in audience. The challenge is to remain independent and still participate in the larger world where there are useful centralized powers. Medium is one of those today. Ev’s also a good guy. And he does believe in the open and distributed Web. Medium is useful for getting the word out to a larger audience than our solo blogs tend to have — and it works well with Zeldman’s approach, which is to republish one’s own blog posts there. Doc
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