Virtually No Customization
Apart from adding images, videos, or embedding social media posts, every post on Medium looks the same. It’s like posting on Facebook—your text and images are different—but every post has basically the same layout and design.
With Medium, there are no themes, apps, or plugins to customize your posts, which makes it one of the most simple free blogging platforms on the market today.
No (Real) Monetization
Medium is not a platform you can use to monetize your blog. There’s no option for ads or eCommerce. It’s explicitly against the rules to “advertise or promote third-party products, services, or brands through Medium posts, publications, or letters,” but you can still promote your blog content with tactics like blogger outreach.
You can use affiliate links, but you’re not allowed to create content “primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service… Scraping and reposting b2b email lists poland from other sources for the primary purpose of generating revenue or other personal gains.” One viable way to earn some income from Medium though, is to write an eBook that you can sell to your most engaged audience (done carefully on an external site, of course).
You Don’t Have a Blog of Your Own
With Medium as your free blog site, you don’t have to take care of the upkeep of a blog, which could be a plus for some. On the other hand, you ultimately have no control over the content that you publish.
You do “own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium.” But your content can also be removed for “any reason.”
Let me be clear. With Medium, you’re publishing on someone else’s website. That means they have control over the way things are presented.
They can also change the way they do things at Medium without consulting you or considering your interests… and hell, they can even go out of business one day, taking your free blog site right along with it.
That’s one of the biggest reasons why hosting your own blog (where you’re in control) is the smartest way to start a blog.