Why I’d Pick Medium Over Substack Every Time
Newsletter growth is brutal, organic reach is not.
Start a Substack. The pitch sounds great. Own your audience. Email is forever. Newsletters are booming.
All of that is true. Doesn’t change the core problem, though.
Growing a newsletter from zero is one of the hardest things to do online right now.
Substack Is a Blog
I’ve written about this before. Substack is a blog with email attached. The email part is what most people argue with or sell. The blog part is what most ignore or underestimate.
Blogs don’t get found on their own. Not without traffic. Not without someone already knowing you exist. You need to bring the audience to Substack. Substack doesn’t bring it to you.
Yes, there are recommendations. Notes. A discovery section. For established writers with existing audiences sending each other traffic, those features work great. For someone starting from zero? Less so.
Growth
Say you want 1,000 Substack subscribers. Reasonable goal.
Where do they come from?
Your social media following. Your cross-posts. Recommendations from bigger newsletters. Guest appearances. Substack Notes someone clicks through.
Every single path requires you to already have an audience somewhere, or to manually build one with another platform (or mechanism like Notes). There is no version of Substack where a stranger types a question into Google, finds your article, and subscribes. Unless you build your Substack specifically for this use case!
Medium has something better here. Not perfect. Not every story. But it exists.
I’ve had Medium stories get picked up either by search engines, by curators, by publications, or just by the algorithm, and collect reads for months or years.
Nobody signed up for my newsletter first. Most still don’t. And I don’t expect them to.
They just found the article through search or through Medium’s own recommendations. That discovery rarely happens on Substack.
Again, unless you build your Substack as a blog for this specific use case.
Medium has…
organic reach. More than Substack at the moment.
The algorithm surfaces stories to non-followers. A new writer with zero audience can publish something today and have it read by strangers tomorrow. Not guaranteed, obviously. That would be too easy.
Not even reliable. Because it’s shouldn’t be that way, actually. Medium doesn’t and shouldn’t always push the same writers.
But it is possible, and that possibility compounds over time. More than on Substack. Or any other platform for writing.
Also, Medium has SEO. Serious domain authority built up over years. A well-titled story ranks on Google. I have articles from 2022 still pulling in reads every week. That longevity is great. It’s one of the better arguments for the platform.
Substack can become this. I do Substack SEO. And it’s starting to pay off. It took a while, though.
As mentioned before, Medium has discoverability inside the platform. Tags, publications, related stories at the end of every article.
Medium is built, so readers keep reading. Substack is built, so subscribers get emails.
Two very different products solving different problems.
And there’s luck, of course. Medium gives you more surface area. More chances. On Substack, growth is linear and mostly manual. On Medium, occasionally something takes off sideways, and you don’t fully understand why.
That’s not nothing.
The Downsides
Medium owns the relationship. Your readers are Medium readers first, yours second. You have some emails. But mostly, not.
If the platform changes its rules (they do, regularly) or changes the Partner Program payout structure (also yes), you’re at their mercy. But I truly think this is fair compared to what we’re getting. Possible instant reach to millions of readers. And monetization for that.
For SEO, the paywall limits reach, yes. Your best work is and should be behind a metered wall. This hinders SEO, but makes direct monetization easier.
Casual readers might bounce before they get attached. SEO brings people in, but conversions from “found this on Google” to “paid subscriber” are soft. That’s okay.
The Partner Program pays inconsistently. Some months make sense. Some months… not so much. It’s not a salary and you shouldn’t treat it like one. Medium doesn’t treat it that way.
But yes, Substack does have something Medium doesn’t: a list. An actual email list you own and can export (with visible email addresses). Medium unfortunately hides those now. They shouldn’t.
The Bottom Line
I publish on both platforms. I’ve written about how I actually make money on Substack in 2026. It’s not nothing, and I’m not leaving.
But if you’re starting from zero and someone makes you pick one, Medium is #1 for me.
Build the reach. Let the algorithm work for you while you have no followers to do that work. Then, once people are finding your writing, point them toward the newsletter.
Burk this was a very helpful piece. I've been growing slowly but surely on Substack but it takes a lot of time to interact with the posts and notes of others and make connections although I've met some great fellow writers where we support each other's work that I highly value.
I've been debating publishing on Medium for awhile now and of course most on Substack say don't. This seems to make the case for why not try?
I'm thinking about getting in Medium.
Thanks for posting this perspective, Burk.