It's a good partnership for us.

- they handle distribution and are better at it than us.

- they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services.

- it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business.

We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.

I'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be around for a long time.

One question though - what do you mean by distribution?

Re: sticking around.

They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be.

Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.

I’m not a fan of Medium (mainly because of the UI both on mobile and desktop) but it doesn’t seem like you have anything to back up what you are saying.

Well they laid off a bunch of people, changed their business model, and are trying to raise another round.

They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.

I’m curious as to what you mean by distribution. I can’t work out what that mean in the context of the web.

Re: distribution.

I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers.

They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers.

I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts.

I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.