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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

His stats for Medium views vs own-host views are the exact opposite of my experience. Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere, and we find the same happening for clients who make the switch too. We tend to recommend publishing on Medium to clients these days, both for the traffic and the inbound link SEO bonus.

There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.

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> Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere

I guess if you're an author, it makes sense to use Medium to find an audience.

But if you're a company, how relevant are those views? Are the people reading your articles a quality audience? Or just random Medium visitors? Does 1000 views equal to even 500 visits to your website? Or to 10 sales?

I think the reading experience is pretty good on Medium: you can easily browse content via topic. But I think the content is more memorable than the author. I never know who wrote a piece on Medium because 1) most blogs look the same 2) the author's name is not really prominent.

So I wonder what's the cost of that increase in views? Would you rather have a tiny blog with 100 visitors a month who follow you closely? Or 5,000 views from random readers who might not remember you the next day?

From the article [emphasis mine]:

> On top of that, the amount of views a given article would get ultimately weren’t that impressive. At least not much/any more than our own blog (given we’d already built up a nice readership).

That's a crucial point made as a side remark. They had already done the hard work of building audience for their own hosted blog, to the level of getting around 10k views on posts already. So, this was about the author hoping for even bigger numbers and perhaps visibility to new audience. Which apparently didn't happen to any significant level.

The best practice (and what Baremetrics is doing) is to do both. Post your content first to your own domain and then later import it with the Medium article import tool.

The double content can be a hard negative hit on SEO, even with canonical links (it's not perfect).

Can stats reported by medium be trusted ? Is there a way to cross-verify their stats ?

"more views" is relative, too -- the Baremetrics blog had been around quite a while and already was pulling in good traffic, so I could see why their new Medium blog wasn't quickly matching their old traffic.

FWIW I've seen similar with my own blog. Posts that get 500 views/day on my site have a total Medium view count of under 2k, ever. I also sorta suspect that Medium doesn't promote the "Imported" articles as much as Medium-native ones (Imported articles set Canonical URL to your original blog post so you get the SEO juice).

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