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Why Writers Are Switching from Medium to Ghost
Medium pays most writers under $100/mo and controls your audience. Ghost gives you 100% ownership, direct revenue, and full design control.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
92% of Medium Partner Program writers earn less than $100 per month. The average monetized post earns $1.20. One writer documented getting 7,642 views and earning $9.65.
Medium reaches roughly 100 million monthly visitors, but only about 700,000 are paying members. That means 99.3% of your potential audience either gets a free article or hits a paywall and bounces.
If those numbers make you uncomfortable, you’re not alone. A steady stream of writers and publications — including FreeCodeCamp (583,000 followers), HackerNoon (8 million monthly readers), and Signal v. Noise (Basecamp’s blog) — have already left Medium for platforms they actually own.
The question isn’t whether Medium is failing writers. The question is what comes next.
How Medium’s Model Works Against You
You Don’t Set Your Own Price
Medium collects $5/month (or $50/year) from readers and distributes a portion of that pool to writers based on “member reading time.” A “read” only counts if a paying Medium member spends 30 seconds or more on your story. Claps, highlights, and responses add engagement points, but the formula is opaque and changes regularly.
You can’t charge $10/month for premium content. You can’t offer a $200/year founding member tier. You can’t sell courses, downloads, or one-time products. Every dollar you earn passes through Medium’s algorithm, and you have zero pricing power.
The Algorithm Decides Your Reach
In April 2024, Medium changed its distribution algorithm. Writers across the platform reported earnings drops of 90% overnight. Medium’s stated goal was to suppress AI-generated content, but human writers got caught in the crossfire.
This is the fundamental problem with algorithm-dependent platforms: you don’t control distribution. A change in Medium’s priorities can erase your audience overnight, and there’s no recourse.
Every Medium Post Looks the Same
There’s no design customization on Medium. No custom fonts. No brand colors. No unique layout. No custom homepage. Every publication on Medium uses the same template, with minor variations in logo and accent color.
For writers building a personal brand or a publication with a distinct identity, this is a dealbreaker. Your work lives inside Medium’s frame, not your own.
The Paywall Hurts Your Readers
Medium’s paywall (non-members get limited free articles per month) creates friction that works against you. Readers arriving from Google, social media, or a shared link hit the paywall and leave. This drives up bounce rates and limits the reach of your best work.
Multiple browser extensions and workaround guides exist specifically to bypass Medium’s paywall — a clear signal that readers find it frustrating.
You Don’t Own Your Audience
Your Medium “followers” are Medium accounts. You can’t email them directly. You can’t export them to another platform. If you leave Medium, those followers stay behind.
Medium does have an email notification system, but it’s not a newsletter — you can’t send standalone emails, segment your audience, design custom templates, or communicate outside of a published post.
What Ghost Offers Instead
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform designed specifically for independent writers and publishers. It handles everything Medium does — writing, publishing, audience building — but puts you in complete control.
You Keep 100% of Revenue
Ghost takes 0% of your subscription revenue. You connect your own Stripe account. If a reader pays $10/month, you get $10 minus Stripe’s ~2.9% processing fee. That’s it.
At $3,000/month in subscription revenue, Substack keeps $300, Medium pays you some fraction of a pool, and Ghost keeps $0.
Ghost(Pro) hosting starts at $18/month for the Starter plan. The Publisher plan ($29/month, billed annually) adds paid memberships and custom themes. The math works in your favor from day one.
Full Design Control
Ghost uses a professional theme system. You can install a premium theme, customize every visual element, or build something entirely custom. Your publication looks like yours — not like a template shared with millions of other writers.
When I browse our Luno theme demo, the difference from Medium is immediate. Custom hero layouts, dark mode, a table of contents for long-form posts, reading progress bars — all controlled through the theme without touching code.
Real Newsletter Capabilities
Ghost has a fully native newsletter system — not a notification system, but actual email publishing with:
- Multiple newsletters per site, each with its own subscription
- Audience segmentation by free member, paid member, tier, or label
- Publish-only, email-only, or publish-and-email modes
- Open rate and click rate analytics
- Custom email design settings
- Automated welcome emails for free and paid subscribers
This replaces the need for Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or any external email tool.
Multiple Membership Tiers
Ghost supports custom paid membership tiers with your own pricing. You can have a free tier, a $7/month supporter tier, and a $25/month founding member tier — each with different content access rules and benefits. Medium gives you zero control over pricing or tiers.
SEO You Actually Control
Ghost gives you per-post control over meta titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, and structured data. Every Ghost theme generates clean XML sitemaps. The platform outputs fast, semantic HTML that search engines understand.
On Medium, you can’t customize any SEO metadata. You can’t set canonical URLs. If you publish the same article on your own blog and on Medium, you can’t point Medium’s version back to your original — Medium claims canonical.
For writers producing evergreen content, this difference compounds over months. A well-optimized Ghost post ranks and drives traffic indefinitely.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Ghost | Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue model | 0% platform fee, direct Stripe | Pool-based, algorithm-driven payouts |
| Monthly earnings (typical) | Keep 100% of subscription revenue | 92% of writers earn < $100/mo |
| Custom domain | Included free | Requires paid membership, on-off history |
| Design control | Full theme system, custom CSS | None — uniform template |
| Newsletter | Built-in, segmented, multiple newsletters | Notification system only |
| Membership tiers | Custom pricing, multiple tiers | Medium’s $5 or $15 tiers (not yours) |
| SEO control | Custom meta, canonical URLs, structured data | None |
| Audience ownership | Full export, your Stripe, your domain | Followers are Medium accounts |
| API access | Full REST API (Content + Admin) | None |
| Self-hosting | Yes (open-source, MIT license) | No |
Who Already Made the Switch
FreeCodeCamp
The largest coding education community on Medium, with 583,000+ followers. They left in 2019 after Medium pressured them to put articles behind the paywall — directly contradicting FreeCodeCamp’s free education mission. They moved to a self-hosted Ghost installation and haven’t looked back. Founder Quincy Larson’s post explaining the move remains one of the most-cited arguments for platform independence.
Signal v. Noise (Basecamp)
DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, moved their 20-year-old blog off Medium in 2019. His reasoning: “Growing ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet.” The blog returned to its own domain on WordPress, but the critique of Medium’s centralization applies equally to any platform-dependent publishing.
HackerNoon
With 8 million monthly page views, HackerNoon was one of Medium’s largest technology publications. They left after Medium banned third-party advertising (destroying HackerNoon’s business model) and rejected an acquisition offer. Their stated reason: “To make the next step as a media company we needed to own our software.”
The Pricing Reality
Medium
Medium membership costs readers $5/month or $50/year. Writers earn from a pool based on member reading time. The platform takes its cut before distributing to writers. There’s no subscription relationship between you and your readers — only between them and Medium.
Ghost(Pro) (as of February 2026)
| Plan | Monthly (billed annually) | Members | Staff | Paid Memberships |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $18/mo | 1,000 | 1 | No |
| Publisher | $29/mo | 1,000 | 3 | Yes |
| Business | $199/mo | 10,000 | 15 | Yes |
All plans include free SSL, worldwide CDN, automated backups, unlimited email sends, and a free custom domain.
Self-Hosted Ghost
Ghost is open-source under the MIT license. Self-hosting on a $5-10/month VPS gives you full control with zero platform fees. You manage your own server, but the cost is minimal for technical writers.
Who Should Stay on Medium
Medium makes sense if:
- You’re writing casually and don’t care about earning real money
- You want the built-in Medium audience (100M monthly visitors) to discover your work
- You have no interest in building a brand or owning your audience
- You want the absolute simplest setup — no domain, no theme, no decisions
Who Should Switch to Ghost
Ghost is the better choice if:
- You want to earn from your writing and keep all of it
- Your brand identity matters — you want a publication that looks distinctly yours
- You’re building a newsletter and want real email tools (segmentation, analytics, design)
- You write SEO-driven content that should rank in Google long-term
- You want multiple revenue streams (free tier, paid tiers, different price points)
- Platform independence matters — you want to own your content and audience permanently
Making the Move
Ghost can import Medium content. The process:
- Export your Medium archive (available in Medium settings)
- Import into Ghost using the built-in Medium importer
- Set up your custom domain
- Install a theme that matches your brand
- Configure your newsletter and membership tiers
- Connect your Stripe account
The technical migration takes a few hours. The real investment is choosing how you want your publication to look and what you want to charge — decisions Medium never let you make.
Start with the Right Foundation
When you move to Ghost, the theme you choose defines your reader’s first impression. A premium Ghost theme gives you everything Medium can’t: a unique homepage layout, dark mode, reading progress bars, custom membership pages, and a design that’s entirely yours.
Our themes are built for Ghost publishers who take their brand seriously, with prices starting at $69. Every theme includes 46 language translations, dark mode, and multiple post layouts.
For a side-by-side comparison of Ghost and Substack (another popular Medium alternative), see our Ghost vs Substack comparison.
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