Where is medium quality blog

But it created an environment in which reporters were confused about how they, or their publications, would ultimately be judged — leaving them vulnerable to being blindsided when the end finally came. Few startups have an easy path to success, and media in particular is a notoriously difficult business.

Just today, digital culture publication MEL laid off its entire staff. Some staffers told me they appreciated the opportunity Williams had given them during a turbulent time, and said he had granted them impressive creative freedom and significant financial resources with which to do their journalism.

Williams was prone to change his mind often, seemingly on a whim, they said, making software development difficult. The product roadmap over the years looks like a series of blind alleys: in , a take on Snapchat stories ; last June, a refreshed newsletter platform ; in January, an acquisition of an e-book publisher.

A skeleton crew of editors will likely be kept on to promote user-generated posts to the relevant sites; what once had been publications are now likely better thought of as topic pages. Meanwhile, the company will continue to rely on Google and Facebook traffic to generate hits it can convert into paid subscribers.

Like Blogger and Twitter before it, Medium will bet on unpaid labor and algorithms. Instead, he points to changes in the industry and shrugs. The media business — what can you do? This column was co-published with Platformer , a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Filed under: Policy. Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. As an editor, I find it relatively easy to give feedback and communicate with our writers on Medium.

Crowdbotics is a remote-first company. We have a core team of 25, about a half dozen of whom are regular blog contributors. We work with a person community of domain-expert developers all over the world as well, many of whom are writing for Crowdbotics on interesting technical challenges they solve for clients. I also regularly work with 3rd parties on contributing content: freelancers, customers, business partners, investors, etc.

Medium makes it convenient for multiple editors to review posts and leave comments in way that is similar to Google Docs. You can also leave private Notes for authors after a post goes live, which comes in handy. If you host and maintain your own business blog, you have the ability and responsibility of optimizing for search from a technical perspective. For a sizable blog, this can be a full-time job or multiple full-time jobs. When you publish on Medium, you must optimize posts from a content and keyword perspective, but you do not have to fuss with technical SEO considerations such as sitemaps, load time, CSS issues, browser and screen compatibility, redirects, broken links and images, erroneous scripts, etc.

With Medium, you have the ability to scale your business blog indefinitely without getting too technical. UI and UX are real problems for many blog platforms and themes. It seems like it should be simple, but there are plenty of business blogs out there that are just unpleasant to read.

Weird layouts, ugly fonts, odd image styling, pop-ups, ads, email captures: they all add up to a cluttered and annoying reading experience. Maintaining a consistent design and pleasant user experience can require attention and technical know-how on other blog platforms.

Mobile optimization is a major factor in Google search rank. Google announced that they would begin to favor mobile-ready sites back in April The immediate impact of the change was not as severe as predicted. Google instead decided to slowly propagate the change, giving sites time to catch up.

Three years after the announcement was made, there is no doubt that mobile matters. Optimizing for mobile can be tricky. Your business blog is ready for every screen. Google has announced that page speed is now an important factor in both desktop and mobile SEO.

According to Google the average time it takes for a mobile landing page to load is now 22 seconds! Page speed is also an important usability metric. Medium has great desktop page speeds and pretty good mobile load times. By re-posting your content on Medium, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines for duplicate content. When you publish on your blog and syndicate to Medium using one of their syndication services, such as the Medium Wordpress plugin , Medium creates a canonical tag which points to your blog as the origin for the content.

Doing so gives you some of the benefits of Medium as a distribution channel, crediting increased exposure to your domain. However, you should not divide your readership if you can avoid it. You want all your views, comments, and shares in the same place. One post with the combined readership of two separate posts is likely to perform better than twice as well because of how search engines treat individual post analytics, the network effect of social sharing, the snowball effect of reader comments, etc.

If you insist on publishing on both blog platforms as a security measure, I would advocate publishing on Medium first, then re-publishing on your own domain and set the canonical tag back to Medium. This would be more of a safety measure than a channel strategy. If the unlikely happens, and Medium just disappears , you can make an easier shift back to your own domain. Unfortunately, Medium no longer offers a custom domain option.

It works simply, has a wonderful interface, is simple to use, looks pretty, and, despite all of that, I wrote a post a while back on why you should not blog at Medium. I have only written 20 blog posts on my Medium blog, neither a heavy user nor convinced that I should become one. But Medium grows in popularity, and one of the features that people tout is its unique approach to analytics. At the top of your dashboard in Medium, in day segments, you can track three basic stats for all of your posts: views, reads, and recommendations.

A chart gives you an overall view of how your content is performing. All of your stories are listed below this chart. You can also see those same three stats, plus an extra one read ratio , for each story that you write. Each story you write on medium has four stats for just that story. Sometimes the most viewed are the least read, which is more common than we realize on our own blogs. Views: This is the classic stat, and answers how many sets of eyeballs saw your story.

It is, pure and simple, a measurement of who came in to take a peek. Reads: This stat is a bit different. In some ways, its similar to the idea of a bounce, but not exactly.

A bounce is when someone visits your site, and then leaves without doing anything beyond that initial page that brought them in. So, your views and your reads will not always be the same number.

Read Ratio: Medium uses an algorithm that calculates how many people actually read your post out of those that view it. According to Ev Williams , founder at Medium, read ratio has an effect on how your post is ranked and found emphasis added by me :. The ratio of people who view it who read it and who read it and recommend it are important factors, not just the number.

In other words, they want to promote posts that get read , and not just clicked on. Sharing and recommendations are done at the bottom of a story in Medium. Recommendations: This stat shows how many people recommended kind of like a share the post on Medium. This is in contrast to the popular idea that social sharing buttons should be at the top of your blog post or page.

Again, Medium seems to be going against the current and wanting their system to be built on promoting the reading of posts, not mindless sharing.

In some situations, the case can be made for not really worrying whether anyone is reading or not. These sentiments are fine for a personal or hobby blog. But what if you are a business investing time and money into content creation with a specific desired return?

It matters if anyone is reading. Click To Tweet. Can you imagine someone trying to write 4, words on "what flavor of ice cream tastes best with red velvet cake? You're done! If you ended up with words, you're still done. If you are blogging multiple times a week or day, you can afford occasional short blog posts. Length can be viewed in the context of your editorial calendar -- if you're offering several long-form, high-value posts a week; shorter, engagement-driven posts can fit into your mix seamlessly.

However, if your name is Seth Godin , all bets are off. Godin is often trotted out as an example of a famous blogger whose posts are pretty consistently short -- often words.

He doesn't publish on a consistent schedule, either. However, you have to remember that Godin's voice and following were built over a multi-decade career as a marketing thought leader. By publishing multiple bestselling books, he's earned the right to create short blogs. I'm sorry to say he's the exception, not the rule. Chances are, the answer to this question is yes.

Not only can social media shares increase your exposure to potential customers, search engines really like social media shares. They're considered "social signals," or human-verified proof of content quality and relevance. Google and other major search engines use social signals to determine content ranking. Posts that are 1, words or longer earn the most shares on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, per Quicksprout research.

Longer posts are more shareable. Neil Patel recommends writing 1, words or more to maximize your social signals. How long is the ideal business blog post? Well, that depends, but chances are, it's pretty long.