Medium v Substack.

2026 Day 92. #BusinessDays.

Reddit is a great source of opinions. I often find myself trying to relate to the views I see on there, so I could see different viewpoints. It has helped me with two major things.

1. Looking through someone else’s experience and eyes.
2. Understanding that every opinion does not need to affect my experience and opinions.

I can choose to fact-check other people’s arguments, see if their opinions are relevant to my needs, and only change my opinions then. This has also helped me hold less anger towards people who do not hold the same opinions as me.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

A recent opinion piece I read was comparing Medium and Substack and each finding some niches. The consensus on the subreddit was as follows.

Medium started out wonderful in the beginning. Everyone was sharing Medium articles and everyone had a good. Then they introduced mandatory subscriptions and paywalls and now the majority of the content is behind paywalls. Not all of the content published is worth the subscription so people started abandoning Medium articles even when they came up on Google searches.

Substack came about with their optional subscriptions where you could read some of the content for free while opting in to pay for your favourite writers. This has made Substack more popular than Medium for casual readers.

I agree with this take for the most part.

I also believe that Medium and Substack are two very different takes on the same thing. I use Medium for my personal blogs while I manage a Substack account for an employer.

Medium allows you to write, and not much beyond it. This is the place where the focus is on the blog. Most times I do not even bother checking out the writer. I read what I want and then move on to the next. There are minimal branding options and it makes me feel like there are more humans in here. Medium makes me believe that there are a lot of individuals active on the platform writing about just about everything.

Substack allows you to do all that and more. But the focus there is rarely on writing. There are a lot of distractions with Notes, personalising your blog, personalising your main blog website, etc. A lot of brands are using it to publish AI slop. It takes the away the pain of developing and handling your own blog and SEO, so it makes more sense to use Substack.

Substack seems the better choice to run a blog for your brand and manage subscriptions while Medium is more suited towards personal writing.

I would like to remind the reader that these are opinion pieces and not to be treated as facts. You might disagree or have had different experiences shaping your unique views but it does not take away from the perspective I hold.

The opinions on Reddit made me feel like Medium is a dying platform while Substack is on the rise.

I tried validating this result from various sites. I tried out 2 platforms that shall remain nameless. I was surprised to see major inconsistencies in the numbers provided by each website. W1 had 90M visits for Medium while W2 had 77M. There is no way I could rely on other platforms for this data. If any reader can help guide me towards better and more reliable results I would do a more dedicated search on this topic.

I choose to continue writing on Medium because the focus is on the content. The platform is elegant and simple and I do spend some time reading on it as well. My biggest frustration is that every article that is pushed on my feed is behind a paywall. I would really like an option where I could view relevant blogs and filter them by free or paid. Medium is not and will not be a commercial activity for me, so I will never be monetising my content here. Even still I am continuously trying to improve my blogs by improving my language and writing about more engaging topics. The lack of VCs, and big name companies using this makes me happy as it makes the platform feel less commercial than Substack. It feels like the space for individuals to come together over capitalising on a personal hobby.

See you tomorrow.