Andrea Phillips:
Now, I’m not saying you should never write unless you see the Benjamins. I’ve written for free before; I’ll do it again. Sometimes, yeah, the exposure is worth it. But even then, it would be foolish to use Medium as a primary platform for your work. If Medium goes away — like Geocities, Bloggers.com, Posterous and countless other startups lo these twenty years gone by — your digital footprint will be gone, too. Poof.
I don’t know about you, but the idea of every link pointing to my work for the last few years suddenly breaking… well, it makes me feel a little queasy. Third-party platforms come and go, but a site and domain you own are forever. Protecting yourself and your work from bitrot is important.
I think Medium is a gorgeous looking platform, but there’s something to be said for protecting your own content. Let’s not get paranoid; I write my thoughts publicly in a lot of places “for free”, from Twitter to GitHub, even maybe someday Medium. But if it comes to selling your content – serving ads, paywalls, much of traditional journalism – think carefully about where you’re placing that content and your associated rights.