Warning Before You Use A Custom Domain
Medium is not under your control. Medium giveth as much as it takes.
What do I mean by this?
Well Medium has already once before taken away custom domains, ok it didn’t remove the already active domains, but it didn’t make it easy to keep them active as far as I am aware.
Medium as with other big brands, whilst it claims it’s doing it for it’s users, changes it’s algorithms continuously. If you are moving your brand domain to Medium (as I have) you need to be fully aware that you are no longer in control as you may be with a self-hosted system. You can’t control who see’s you content when. Even in your own publication, you have no say that what you posted yesterday will be at the top if Medium decides to change it’s design.
Medium currently operates as a Members system with members read-time in essence paying the bills. There is no say that will stick around, Medium may return to the paywall style. If that does return, can your business survive it? what if an Adsense-style system was implemented — how would that affect your content and style?
The other big issue faced for some like me is that we have hundreds of old articles, but Medium doesn’t offer redirects within their system (that we can see). This is a bit of an issue — lets hope there is a fix coming?
Whilst for most these won’t be massive issues, for a few they are big enough. These are all considerations we all face.
But do the positives of branding, sending more visitors (for an older domain like my own) and sending authority make it worth while?
Got a new custom domain on Medium?
Put a link in the responses!
—
Andy Kinsey is a regular contributor to Medium, SEO and occasional political geek.
You can follow him here on twitter.
