What’s a platform anyway?
I’ve been doing a lot of exploring lately in search of an ideal home for my words. I think maybe Medium is looking like a nice place to be.
With the fracturing of social spaces over the past year, it’s been an interesting time to consider options for what feels meaningful about sharing thoughts big and small. If we have to start again, do we even want to go somewhere that’s just the same as the place we’re leaving?
It’s all been a trivial thought for the most part. Until the itch to write more for a public audience started to enter my mind again. If I write more — where do I hang my shingle?
Over the past five years I’ve experimented more than most with trying to commercialise small sites and the work of small teams. One of the big lessons was that monetising is too hard if you also want to respect your reader.
I don’t begrudge companies and individuals who want to try really hard to scrape every cent they can off a pageview. But I’ve always been a bit overly idealistic about trying to offer a nice reading experience — one without a dozen crappy Google ads or a chumbox full of misinformation links. That idealism meant I just couldn’t drive enough revenue on six figures of pageviews per month.
So I tried the subscription path, but couldn’t scale that effectively. Partly I struggled to carve out the time to deliver lots of content to make someone feel good about paying me $5–10/month. Partly I’m just not important enough to reach a critical mass that becomes a genuine slice of my income.
Now I’ve pivoted my business to serve as a content studio to some of the biggest tech brands in the world, and it’s going great. But having an outlet for my more editorial or creative thoughts is an itch I want to scratch again. But where do I run with that?
I don’t want to manage a web server if I don’t have to. Byteside is the one place I require a presence, and that sits on Ghost — a great platform. The Byteside blog still sits there, with its archive of writing by a bunch of cool folks. But the future of that brand is a content studio, not an editorial function. So I’m putting new editorial elsewhere.
Substack has evolved but it’s still about building a direct brand you ask people to subscribe to. And that feels like the wrong way forward when I just want to share cool words on an irregular basis.
So after a bunch of explorations across newsletter services and alternate content management systems I’ve decided Medium is in a great place right now. It’s a lovely place to write. It’s a great place to read. It offers a nice experience if I send people here to look at my work. And I can also set up publications easily if I want to demarcate work into themes or channels.
So… Hi Medium! Long time reader, first time writer.
