Have you come to find out what the fuss of Substack VS Medium is all about? Well then, read on to find out!
Publishing Platforms and Newsletters provide writers and authors the opportunity to get paid in a meaningful way. So, aspiring writers spent their time polishing their writing skills doing the age-old formula. Writing constantly as practice.
Whilst doing that, this practice benefits both the writer and their audience. Writers get paid to create content and blog of their own. Readers are also given the platform to read the content, all while enjoying an ad-free experience.
It doesn’t matter if you are a person writing a blog, a journalist, or an aspiring writer. The following comparison will hopefully help you in discovering the best platform to write for you.
Table of contents
Overall Summary
Medium
Medium is an online publishing domain that helps writers publish their work online for a willing audience. You can even think of it as a type of social media platform for writers. With this, writers can post their blog, article, novel, or any other type of content and connect with people.
The platform has a personalized recommendation system that helps them in a big way by suggesting their post to the readers based on their interests. Although Medium is generally considered to be a blog platform, people can also upload video and audio content.
Substack
Substack is a subscription-based publishing platform that allows content creators to earn money through their work.
While Substack allows you to post unrestricted, it works primarily like a newsletter subscription service. Email newsletter on Substack allows authors to monetize their subscribers. While the platform is popular with amateur authors, podcasters, journalists, and other types of internet publishers use and enjoy the platform email marketing solution.
How does it work?
Writing on Medium is quite simple. Writers just need to visit the online site and sign up. But do note that before they can start writing, they will need to complete all the mandatory verifications.
Once the writers start writing on Medium, the algorithm on it will start working. Just like with social media, Medium will suggest the work to people who read content based on their interests. This makes it very easy for the articles to reach the audience far and wide.
An added feature is that writer’s content can rank on Google or can even go viral. So promoting their work to subscribers on social media can benefit them in the long run. The only way to earn money writing is to join the Medium Partner Program. So make sure that you are eligible and meet the criteria for Medium Partner Program.
Newsletters, articles, and other content are called publications on Substack. Anyone with an email Id can use the Substack website.
Substack helps authors and other creators publish content and built-in newsletter management tools. Creators themselves can monetize their work by setting up a subscription fee starting at $5* per month. While you can publish complimentary content on Substack, you will only get to pay when you have set up a subscription.
Substack seizes up to 10% of each subscriber’s income.
Features
- If you use Medium, you can easily be a part of the community for writers and readers. There are popular features such as comments, follows, and claps that can help you build your audience.
- There is an option to brand by using a custom domain for your Medium blog. The subscription fee for that costs about $5* per month.
- The writers can see their statistics and how each of their articles performs with a metric. Users can see real-time things like their audience’s total time spent reading,
- Medium has about 100 million active subscribers, which means content writers have a built-in audience.
- One downside of Medium is that readers will have to pay $5* per month to have access to unlimited content on the publishing platform. Free users can only access 5 content for free per month. The writers get paid based on total monetary compensation from the membership program.
- Substack helps users to create their custom domain for a one-time payment of $50* Only.
- Substack has an analytic component that permits creators to track their subscribers’ traffic with their email using an open rate.
- One of the best features in Substack that is not available in Medium is the feature of allowing multiple creators to collaborate and post their creations under one publication.
- Substack allows creators to customize their newsletters to match their websites.
- You can get paid on Substack when your subscribers increase. The more subscription on your platform, the more you earn.
Why should you use it?
The system where you earn money is directly proportional to the time people spend reading your content on Medium. On this platform, you can earn money in a shorter amount of time. With the large number of readers that use Medium daily, getting subscribers will equate to getting the articles viral and earning.
The platform is a good option if you enjoy reading the newsletter and want to increase your email subscribers. The best part is that Substack is very cheap. Because you use the email marketing platform to set the price for your email newsletters, you can make a large sum of money from there.
Pros
- The setup on Medium is very easy and confusion-free.
- You don’t need to have any prior coding knowledge to use Medium.
- The default design on the platform is very clean and mobile-friendly.
- The algorithm for recommending content on Medium is very advanced and can help your articles grow their audience.
- It is SEO-friendly and can help you on the platform.
- You can publish images and video content on it too.
- Writers who join the partner program on Medium can get paid up to five figures per month.
- The process of creating and increasing the email subscription newsletter is made very simple.
- Substack allows you to put your premium content behind a paywall. This way, you can monetize your email list.
- Various topics are popular on Substack. The writer can select any topic to write on the platforms’.
- Substack allows you to include podcasts in your newsletter.
- There are over 20 million readers on Substack.
Cons
- Because Medium offers free users only 5 articles for free per month, likely, your content will only get viewed by subscribers of the membership.
- While theoretically, you can earn a large sum of money. In reality, individual writers only get paid up to $100* per month. The reason for this is that competition is very fierce on the publishing platform with thousands of content creators publishing work every day.
- You can not use display ads to monetize your blog.
- It is blocked in some countries.
- Just because people are visiting the platform doesn’t necessarily mean that they will visit your post. Only a small percentage of the traffic on the site will read what you have to publish.
- There are no marketing platforms connected to Substack. You will have to build your audience from scratch.
- Substack can get a particular share from your earnings.
- The company takes 85% of your subscription revenue from your first year. That is, you sign up for Substack Pro.
Alternatives
WordPress – This open-source forum has been the top choice to make 43% of all sites on the internet.
At its heart, WordPress is the easiest, most widespread way to make your website.
WordPress permits you to construct many kinds of websites, from individual blogs and online shops to online publications and newspapers.
WordPress terminates the necessity of requiring to know how to code to build a website. While WordPress uses a variety of coding lingoes, there’s no need to know any of them to use it.
WordPress contains a built-in media library where you can upload and implant media files such as images or videos into your pages or posts. You can even conduct primary modifications to your images on WordPress.
Patreon – A forum for creators of all kinds (video, podcast, authors) to gain from their creations, allowing you to share directly to paying followers.
There are more than 200,000 active Patreon accounts right now.
While Ad revenue payments come from views and clicks, Patreon makers obtain compensation based on immediate engagement. The website lets you motivate patrons to take an involved curiosity in your creations. For example, suggesting premium access to art not glimpsed beyond your Patreon account.
While Patreon does not charge you, they do take a portion of your revenues. The payment can change between 3% and 12%.
Substack VS Medium: Who can publish on it?
As we have seen before, anyone can post both on Medium and Substack. The difference between the two is just what type of writer you want to be.
The Substack option is better if you want to commit as a regular author. On that platform, readers are always expecting your newsletters. As they are paying for that, Substack has a higher quality of content. On Substack, you need to commit to writing 2-4 newsletters a week. There is no way of finding your account if you are not using your newsletter or marketing it.
Meanwhile, on Medium, you can write at any time you please. You can write 2-4 a month if you don’t have any readers waiting to read. There is no one on Medium to hold you to a standard.
This shows that the main differences between Medium and Substack are that on Medium you can be a new author but on Substack, you need to be a seasoned pro.
Substack VS Medium: Can you use it to make money?
On Substack, you can start earning money from the moment you use it as the platform allows you to monetize your email. You need to keep a minimum of $5 for your publications and go higher from there. Authors can keep up to 90% of the revenue, making it a predictable income.
Another way to make cash on substack is via companion trade. You’re unrestricted to add companion links to your content. But you have to be careful. Substack doesn’t allow publications that concentrate just on companion advertisements.
On Medium, however, you need to jump through a few hoops to make cash. The primary way to monetize on Medium is through the partnership program.
Substack VS Medium: Ownership of the content
Substack and Medium both have a publisher’s agreement which states clearly that the authors own what they create. All of your writings are protected by copyrights and will remain yours. They do have limited access to your writings so that they can promote them, including distributing and permitting readers to use, access, and download.
Can you publish a book on Substack?
Substack does allow it, as long as it is not plagiarized from somewhere else.
How much does Medium pay per 1000 views?
Medium delivers different shares per 1000 views, with some authors earning pennies and others making $20+ per thousand views. They don’t just pay authors based on views; engagement and read span also go into Medium’s algorithm.
Can you publish on both Substack and Medium?
Yes! Of course, you can. Anything that you own can be posted on both platforms.
Conclusion
In summary, Medium is for everyone. Substack is for verified authors. On Substack, you own your readers, making it easy to build a dedicated community. On Medium, the company owns the users.
If you are a new author with few followers, you can use the Medium algorithm to reach millions of readers. Plus, the chances of using SEO to rate your writings on SERPs are higher on Medium.
Substack, on the other hand, is for authors with a substantial follower base. There’s no organic way to reach more users than by promoting your subscription newsletter.
