✍BadRedhead Media, Strategic Marketing Consultant

#WritingCommunity Medium, Substack, or Beehiiv: Which One Is Best for You? | @BadRedheadMedia geni.us/MediumSubstack… The biggest difference isn't the format - it’s who owns the relationship with our readers. Every few weeks, a writer asks me whether they should be on Medium, Substack, or Beehiiv (yes, it's spelled with two i's). My answer is usually an annoying little truth bomb: “It depends.” Not because I’m trying to be vague or difficult, but because each of these platforms is built for completely different goals. It’s a little like asking whether you should buy a bicycle, a pickup truck, or a boat, but before we can answer that, we need to know where you wanna go. As authors, we tend to focus on writing. Understandable. We became writers because we ya know, like words and stuff. But after fifteen years of helping authors market books, I’ve learned that the bigger question isn’t where you publish your newsletter. It’s what happens after someone discovers you. 💥 Gratitude to my exclusive advertising sponsor, the always-free Booklinker, and the paid tool, GeniusLink. I love both💥 (affiliate link). Medium: The Busy Shopping Mall Medium is like renting a kiosk in a busy shopping mall: thousands of people walk past every day. Some stop. Some browse. A few buy something. The good news is that the mall already has traffic. The bad news is that it’s still the mall’s traffic. I wrote there regularly for several years. In my experience, it went downhill. Several factors you can read about here. Medium’s biggest advantage is discovery. People can stumble across your work without ever hearing of you before, which is appealing when you’re starting from scratch. “As of February 2025, Medium is one of the 520 most visited websites on the internet. It ranks 401 in the United States and has 105.4M monthly views worldwide. In the last three months, it has received 316.3M total views, with people spending about 2:16 minutes on the platform when they visit. The United States is the top country sending desktop traffic to Medium.” ~ Kristina God, MBA Medium’s biggest disadvantage is audience ownership. If someone reads your article, that’s great. If they “clap” for it (similar to liking it), even better. If they follow you, wonderful. But you don’t get a subscriber list. You can’t export those followers and take them somewhere else. Even when they’ve signed up with their email to receive your posts, you don’t own that email - Medium does. In book marketing, visibility matters. But visibility without a way to stay connected is a little like handing out flyers in a parking lot; we might get attention today, but tomorrow those people are gone. For journalists, essayists, and thought leaders, Medium can work very well (though most journalists have migrated over here). For authors trying to build a long-term readership, it has limitations. Read more: geni.us/MediumSubstack… Free to read and subscribe