Common Challenges Faced by Medium Bloggers. The Real Struggles of Blogging on Medium
While there are many benefits to blogging on Medium, there are also some challenges and limitation that bloggers may encounter. Let’s explore the downsides of blogging on Medium (aka Cons of using Medium)
Limited Control and Ownership
One of the main challenges of using Medium as a primary blogging platform is the issue of limited control and ownership. Because Medium owns the platform, they ultimately have control over the content published on their site. This means that bloggers may not have the same level of control over their content as they would on a self-hosted website. Additionally, if Medium were to shut down or change their policies, bloggers may risk losing their content or even their entire audience.
Competition and Visibility
As Medium continues to grow in popularity, the platform may become more saturated with content, making it more difficult for individual bloggers to stand out. With so much competition, it can be challenging for bloggers to attract and maintain a loyal audience. Additionally, because Medium is a closed platform, it may be more difficult to reach new readers outside of the existing Medium community.
Lack of Customization Options
Another challenge of using Medium as a blogging platform is the limited customization options available. While Medium offers a range of formatting options for text and images, bloggers are somewhat limited in their ability to fully brand and customize their blog. This may impact the overall look and feel of the blog, making it more difficult to stand out from the crowd.
Limited Control and Ownership
While Medium offers numerous benefits to bloggers, one of the most significant drawbacks is the limited control and ownership that bloggers have over their content. Unlike a personal blog, where the blogger has complete control over the design, branding, and content, Medium has strict guidelines for formatting and design. Bloggers cannot modify the platform’s layout or add custom features to enhance the user experience. One of the most significant challenges of blogging on Medium is that the platform controls the content posted on it, and not the blogger. Medium has the right to remove or edit any content that violates its policies or guidelines, which can make some bloggers feel uneasy about sharing their work on the platform.
Limitation Free Speech
Medium.com blogs have limitation on free speech and also creators and corporates can’t write marketing content. Each blog post undergoes moderation and can be removed or your account be suspended for violating the Medium rules and terms of publishing. While self-hosted blogs on blog hosting sites hosted on The-Online.com’s servers have advantage of free speech and even DMCA is ignored. But this doesn’t happen with Medium blogs. A competitor can copy your content on their own blog and send a DMCA to Medium.com and it will result in your original content been taken down. That’s a major cons of starting a blog or publishing article post on Medium.com than publishing on your own blog. Remember, you – the creator, is only a tenant of Medium. You don’t own anything and it can be completely deactivated or shadow-banned by Medium algo.
No SEO Benefit and Limited Visibility in Search Engines
While a few trusted and old Medium blogs have meta robots tag that allows the article content to get crawled and indexed in search engine like Google, the new content creators and corporate bloggers have noindex tag that tells the search engines not to index the content which limits the visibility only to Medium users who pay to remove the paywall to read your content. Plus Medium lacks SEO and schema markup which does not allow it content to be cited in AI chatbots like chatgpt, Gemini, etc. In year 2025 we saw Google de-indexing many Medium post as well as not ranking them on page one anymore. This shows Medium might have lost trust and they could be ample of non-helpful content published on their platform which Google doesn’t likes anymore. Medium ruined the trust of corporate blogging and personal content creators.
These are the reasons why blogging on Medium is more challenging than it seems.
