Could Medium be the Youtube of Written Content?
From the standpoint of viewer traffic and money, there’s just no way-no how. YouTube is the most successful and profitable video streaming platform out there. I could rattle off the statistics, but I believe we all know good and well how mega-popular YouTube is. No offense to Medium, but, a comparison to YouTube — on almost any level — would clearly be a futile task.
That said, I’m going to go against my own judgement and compare Medium to YouTube. Just hear me out for a second.
Just like anyone can arrive here on Medium and write about whatever his or her heart desires, so too can people post videos on YouTube. (I know, a groundbreaking discovering.) And in the same way that YouTube pays its video creators, Medium has found a way to pay its partner program writers.
Given the massive difference in viewers and readers, the moola does not roll in for us writers the way it does for popular YouTubers. Still, there are writers who have figured out how to turn their written content on Medium into a full-time gig.
This truly amazes me, that even a 4 or 5-minute blog post could get compensated…in the same way a 4 or 5-minute video can.
Like YouTube, Medium uniquely gives writers an opportunity to spout off about anything (mostly), and any random post could gain traction and gain revenue, so long as people read it.
Though as I often see with very successful articles on Medium, they aren’t all that random — these articles are great reads, containing fascinating stories, and riddled with tremendous advice. In other words, Medium writers produce really solid content…and deservedly get paid for it.
Medium is the best one-stop-shot for written content.
I go to YouTube to check out so many different types of videos. Sometimes it’s for that hilarious cat video; sometimes it’s for a video teaching me how to fix a flat tire; and sometimes it’s to listen to a specific song.
I think the same could be said of Medium, in a way. Growing up, reading articles online was made somewhat difficult by the fact that you needed to hop from site to site to read what you wanted. Often times you might not even know what website you want to go to for your written content. Reading on the internet is still very much like that — made somewhat easier by social media and article curation — but a site like Medium seems to be inching us towards an easier way articles to read online.
I could go on-and-on, comparing and contrasting YouTube and Medium, but the point is this:
Medium is the one platform out there — that I know of — which allows people the creative freedom to publish whatever written content they want…and actually have an immediate audience and also get compensated for it.
In that sense, Medium is a lot like YouTube.
Perhaps it starts and ends there. Obviously the most popular Medium writers will never make anywhere close to the amount of money that successful YouTubers do, nor create such a massive following.
Nonetheless, it’s awesome that such a platform exists for writers. As an introvert I’m not at all yearning to put myself in front of a camera on a regular basis anyway. In fact, I’d guess that most of us are like that…and that’s probably why we blog instead of vlog.
At any rate, I’ve really enjoyed getting back in the swing of things on Medium over the past month, and I’m excited to see where things go from here — not just for myself, but for this platform as a whole.
