Why Medium beats Substack and Patreon hands-down
It’s all in the monthly cost
It’s taken a while — I joined Medium in 2020 — but I am now an evangelist for the platform.
My case will be brief, because Medium’s strength — its selling point — is ingeniously simple.
Medium members pay one subscription fee that gives access to ALL the writers on the platform. This is sustainable. This is in the spirit of open access.
Compare that with Patreon and Substack. How sustainable are they? I’d say patently not. To follow just one account on either of those platforms is likely to cost you as much, if not more, than a Medium membership that opens access to countless thousands of accounts.
Here’s an example. This is the Patreon membership page of a photographer I subscribe to (for free) on YouTube. He offers extra material on Patreon. But look at the monthly membership tiers:
To my mind, this is insane. We have slipped into a ramshackle, micro-publishing world where individual creatives are placing a value on the content they create which pitches them on a par with companies like Netflix or AppleTV+. Like I say…
