Is Substack Really Better Than Medium?
An honest breakdown of Substack to help you decide if it’s right for you.
I find it very funny that after five years on the platform, and the countless hours of research and time I put into my writing, the story that goes viral is an article where I’m complaining about the state of Medium.
If being meta is the only way I can finally make decent money on this platform, I’ll do it!
A lot of people had questions about Substack and asked if one can really earn more there. The answer depends on what your goals are as a writer and whether you’re ready to play the long game or just want instant gratification with no stability.
What is Substack?
Substack is a platform where writers can publish their work for a subscription-based audience. You’re creating a newsletter and website to showcase your writing, but instead of having to do everything from scratch, which costs money and can be difficult, you can do it for free on Substack.
Just like Medium, you can post any type of written content from fiction to news commentary. You can also post videos and podcasts.
There’s also a section called “notes” which is very similar to Threads/X/Bluesky, where you can post quick quips about anything you want and include a photo or video. You can also post your Substack content links as a note to promote it to other users.
Some notes get a lot of engagement, but I’ve read that most of the time, having popular notes doesn’t transfer to having more subscribers. It can, but it’s best to not rely on that.
A lot of people have complained that their notes do not get any engagement at all and just the dumbest notes become popular. It’s just an extra thing that you can use if you want to.
How to Make Money on Substack
The main way to make money on Substack is to build an audience of paid subscribers. You can charge whatever amount you want, but the minimum is $5 a month. Substack takes 10% of whatever you earn.
You can also offer free content, which is recommended when you’re just starting out, unless you’re famous or have a big social media following and can build an audience of dedicated, paid subscribers overnight.
This handy Substack subscriber calculator will help you see how much you can earn based on how many subscribers you have and how much you charge per month.
I’m currently offering free content and will eventually start making paywalled content in addition to still posting free writing once I reach a certain number of subscribers.
Substack is not easy money at all. If you want to get rich quickly, you need to change careers because writing is not going to get you there unless you’re extremely lucky or well-connected.
Writers are masochists, but if this is your passion like it is mine, you’ll be driven by that passion and will put in the work necessary to build your audience and sell your books/guides/etc.
It’s a lot more work to make money on Substack than on Medium because you have to build your audience from scratch. This is what I mean by the “long game” versus instant gratification.
The best advice I’ve read about writing on Substack is, “Expect to not make any money during your first year posting on Substack.”
You certainly can, and some do, but rather than expecting to reach 1,000 subscribers in a month with 50% of them eagerly giving you money to read your wonderful words, it’s better to go in with more realistic expectations.
On Medium, you can make money a lot faster by getting boosted or having the algorithm gods bless your story. All you need to do is keep rolling the dice, churning out story after story, and hope a written work of yours can make more than tea or coffee money for the month.
The downside to that is Medium has proved time and time again that it’s very unreliable for steady income or for earnings that fairly reflect the amount of work you put into your writing. You can make hundreds of dollars one month and pennies the next.
Even if you keep putting out quality articles regularly, there’s no guarantee that the Medium algorithm will show them to a soul.
The number of subscribers you have on Medium means absolutely nothing. I’ve seen writers with over 10,000 subscribers getting less than 100 claps and only one to two comments on their recent stories. Is that the future you want for yourself?
So either you can keep writing in the void, putting all your hopes into getting a lucky roll or two, and then going back into obscurity the next month, or you can start building an audience of readers who will be notified when you post and will be more likely to become paid subscribers and buy your books.
Building an audience on Substack is a lot harder than getting followers on Medium, but what good is having a lot of Medium followers if none of them even know you posted?
There is an option to receive email notifications from your favorite writers on Medium, but in my experience, very few people sign up to receive email notifications and it seems like only a small percentage of people who have signed up actually read my articles when I post them.
I haven’t been able to build an audience of regular readers on Medium, but I feel like the way Substack is set up, it would be easier to do there because anyone can sign up to receive email notifications when you post. They don’t need to sign up for Substack.
That makes a big difference for me since I get a lot of traffic from my YouTube videos, but as far as I can tell, none of my YouTube readers have signed up for Medium to keep reading my articles. They just read the one article I linked to and go about their day.
Substack has built-in subscription buttons that will encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter by entering their email address, and that’s it, no extra steps are needed.
How to Promote Your Substack and Build Your Audience
Substack does promote writers on their main page, but they tend to promote people who are either famous like Slavoj Žižek or Chuck Palahniuk, or who already have thousands of subscribers.
It’s best to not rely on gaining subscribers within Substack and look at other ways to promote your writing. If your goal is to be an author and sell books, guides, or courses, this is something you will need to do anyway.
If you just want to write without additional self-promotion, you can keep posting on Medium and hope your stories will make money, or start pitching stories to publications that accept submissions from freelance writers like Vox. You can also submit your writing to contests and anthologies.
I’m promoting my horror novel Substack, Full Moon Party Massacre and my dark tourist blog, The Spooky Tourist, by posting related videos on my TikTok and YouTube channels and adding a link to my writing in the video descriptions.
Since I already post spooky videos on my channels, promoting my horror book and dark tourist blog will reach an audience interested in those topics.
I’m promoting The Future is Vegan on vegan Reddit subs because I already use Reddit and my vegan posts get high engagement.
So I’m using other platforms to promote my writing, but I was already doing that on Medium and not retaining any new followers or making additional money from it because of Medium’s members-only layout.
Don’t spread yourself thin by signing up for a bunch of different social media platforms to promote your writing. Just choose one or two that you already use and focus on that.
Make Medium Work For You If You Want to Keep Posting Here
There are still benefits to writing on Medium. That’s why I’m still posting here even though I complained about not making enough money.
Instead of relying on Medium earnings and feeling disappointed when I can’t even buy vegan pizza with my payout, I’m now using Medium to promote my Substack and as an outlet to write about other topics that don’t fit my three Substack publications.
I’ve stopped expecting to make money on here. So if I do, great, if not, I have bigger goals anyway. I’m playing the long game instead of expecting to pay bills with lottery tickets. This is just another extra platform for me to showcase my work.
Don’t marry one platform and rely soley, or mostly, on those earnings because all platforms are volatile. I saw it with YouTube and the Adpocalypse and recently with TikTok being banned in the U.S. temporarily.
If you’re relying on only one platform and their algorithm suddenly changes, or your account gets deleted without warning, or your earnings suddenly plummet or cease to exist, you’re going to be in a very stressful situation where you have to scramble to figure out another source of income
Manage Your Expectations
It’s important to do your research and know what you’re getting into when starting any platform with the expectation of earning money from it. There are too many charlatans making empty promises of easy riches when the reality is very different.
Maybe neither Substack or Medium are right for you and it’s better for you to focus on freelance writing or working for a company and earning a steady paycheck. Do what works for you.
What are your goals as a writer? And how do you plan on reaching those goals? That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
As I get older, I want to finally be able to live off of my writing and video content so I can fully focus on creating rather than worrying about how I’m going to pay rent next month.
Subscribe to my Substacks: Full Moon Party Massacre, where I post chapters of my upcoming horror novel as well as the inspiration behind it. The Future is Vegan is about the vegan lifestyle and latest vegan news. The Spooky Tourist, contains ethical guides to spooky, occult, and death-related places around the world. All my Substacks have free content every week.
