When to Put It Behind Paywall
And when not to
Every story I publish on Medium goes behind the paywall. Every single one. It’s just how I do it. The Partner Program is there to earn, so you earn.
But the longer I’ve been at this, the more I think that’s my thing and not necessarily the right thing.
There are real, tangible reasons to publish free. Not as a default, not forever, but for specific pieces with specific goals.
Let me make a case for not paywalling.
Why I do it anyway
My reasoning is pretty simple.
Most of what I write is opinion and observation. Tech takes, creator economy stuff, personal essays.
I also already have a pretty large Medium following and subscriber base. That matter. I also already have a free publishing platform: Substack.
For my content, Medium’s internal distribution is the main discovery path. The algorithm, the feeds, Boost.
If it’s going to find readers, it finds them on Medium. And those readers are often members. So the paywall doesn’t block them.
It works for me. Not spectacularly. But it works.
The problem is I’m also leaving things on the table. Three things, specifically.
SEO
A paywalled story on Medium is indexed by Google. The title shows up. Maybe the first paragraph. Then it stops. Non-members hit the wall and leave.
A free story is fully indexed. The whole thing. Google can crawl it, rank it, send traffic to it for months or years. If you write something that answers a real question people actually search for, a free story can bring in readers long after you’ve forgotten you wrote it.
This matters most for how-to content, comparisons, tool reviews, anything with a search-intent keyword behind it. “Best notes apps for Mac.” “How to start on Medium.” “Substack vs Ghost for writers.” Those titles have search demand. A paywalled version of that story gets a fraction of the traffic a free version would.
I wrote about SEO on Medium a while back and my opinion hasn’t really changed: most writers underestimate it. The paywall makes it worse.
Digital products
This is the one I think about a lot now.
If you sell anything (a guide, a template, a course, an icon pack), free stories are your best top-of-funnel. A paywalled story reaches Medium members only. A free story reaches anyone who finds it, including people arriving from Google who have never heard of you and would never pay for a Medium subscription.
The funnel is: free story ranks for a keyword, reader finds it, reader reads the whole thing, reader sees your product linked naturally in context, reader buys.
That funnel doesn’t work behind a paywall. The reader hits the wall. They’re gone. They never see your product link.
I’ve started thinking about this differently recently. A $15 guide sold to a reader who arrived from Google is not bad. Might be better than the earnings from member reads.
And it doesn’t require them to be a Medium member at all. Free stories make that possible.
Audience growth
Free stories grow your audience faster.
A non-member who reads your free story can still follow you on Medium. They can still subscribe to your newsletter. They can still share your piece. They can become a Medium member later.
None of that happens if they bounce off the paywall.
So why don’t I do it?
Habit, mostly. And the fact that my content is on Medium and Substack.
When you write mostly observation and opinion, going free doesn’t help as much. There’s no keyword to rank for.
But when I write more how-to content, more comparisons, more practical guides, I’d split it.
And if I were building a product business alongside my writing, I’d be more deliberate about using free stories as a funnel.
A rough framework
If you’re trying to figure out your own approach, ask three questions.
Does this have real search potential? Would someone who doesn’t know you type a version of this title into Google? If yes, lean free.
Are you selling something? Do you have a product, a course, a newsletter you want to grow? Free stories extend your reach beyond Medium’s walled garden. If you’re building a business, some of your content should live outside the wall.
Is the audience for this already on Medium? Personal essays, opinion pieces, niche Medium takes. If discovery only happens through Medium’s algorithm, the paywall doesn’t hurt you. Paywall those.
Most pieces answer all three consistently. The hard ones are where the answers split. In those cases, I’d lean toward free more often than most writers do. You can always earn from a piece in other ways. You can’t un-bounce a reader who left because of the wall.
The Bottom Line
Paywalling everything is the easy default. It makes sense if you’re writing opinion content for an existing Medium audience.
BUT… it caps your reach, limits your SEO, blocks your product funnel, and slows your audience growth outside Medium. Those are real costs. Worth knowing about before you just… paywall everything by default.
Like I do. (Working on it.)
If you want to go deeper on building a sustainable Medium strategy rather than just optimizing individual stories, the Medium Growth Guide is where I lay out how I actually think about all of this.
Also, I haven’t even gotten into the new Medium earnings system for external reads and member growth.