Exposure is one reason. Two of my articles have over 3k views. On medium you can make good content and get a decent amount of views much easier than hosting own blog and growth hacking.
It's super easy to get 10k views on an article. My most read article has over 100k views. Probably less than 10% of the views come from Medium itself or Google so there is really no benefit in using Medium. You could use a static host and give your readers a better experience.
It's definitely not hard to get eyes on an article, but you're probably underestimating the amount of views that Medium brings. It has excellent discovery, and based on anecdata from friends who have tried A/B testing this stuff, 90%+ easily come from Medium, especially in the 100,000+ view-range, unless you're intentionally going out of your way to spam the link to your personal site everywhere.
Also, a substantial amount of views come from search engine traffic with almost every bit of content on the internet, unless you're doing it wrong. Your most recent post is full of frequently-searched terms. It seems unlikely that little of it is coming from search engines, and almost impossible that most of that viewership is coming from something other than Medium's discovery.
Maybe try A/B testing with your next article? I think we'd all be interested in that.
pier25|6 years ago
kick|6 years ago
Also, a substantial amount of views come from search engine traffic with almost every bit of content on the internet, unless you're doing it wrong. Your most recent post is full of frequently-searched terms. It seems unlikely that little of it is coming from search engines, and almost impossible that most of that viewership is coming from something other than Medium's discovery.
Maybe try A/B testing with your next article? I think we'd all be interested in that.