The Medium Feature That Might Make You Money, Just Not on Medium
The “Unlisted” feature on Medium means you can’t make money on Medium…but it makes for great teaching materials so you can make money elsewhere
This past winter, I was brought into a university classroom at Toronto Metropolitan University as a sessional instructor to co-teach an undergraduate course in Environmental Studies.
Ironically, my BA degree was in this exact discipline, but this time I was brought into the classroom to teach the students how to make a podcast — which is what I have focused on in my career for the last decade.
Months before, the professor approached me with a question: He wanted to make the main term assignment a first-person narrative podcast, but had no idea how to teach audio production…would I come to teach his students how to create a narrative podcast?
I was thrilled with this opportunity to teach at a university level, but knowing where to begin was not intuitive. I’ve worked as a professional for years, mostly as a solo-creator. But here I have to reverse-engineer everything I know.
How should I translate the small idea (what the students need to know) and make sure that it’s not confused with the bigger task (how you approach this task after decades of experience)
I began by breaking it down into smaller questions:
- What are the three most important things to know about how to make audio?
- Where is a good place to start?
- What is the lesson you want the students to take away with them?
And then I did an analysis of this cohort: mostly first-and-second-year students. They are mostly all Gen-Z digital natives who live online. They are also the first generation of Covid kids to hit post-secondary education.
I outlined with my Ideal Customer Avatar (AKA an undergrad student)
- They likely don’t subscribe to online news/information retailers (like Medium)
- They don’t want to or can’t afford to pay for a membership (like Medium)
- Handwriting notes is unusual
- They already do everything online
- They have come to expect robust and highly functional platforms/apps with everything in one place
- They like visual and dynamic content
- They like checklists and work-flows
- They don’t want to click out and get lost…after all they are trying to focus!
Here’s where I felt stuck. The interface of Medium was perfect in every way. Medium is dynamic, it’s visual, and it has everything I want and need, and it’s all-in-one-place.
Except for the paying part of it — which is of course also how I make money on Medium.
I knew that the membership requirement would be the killer. Students cannot and will not pay $5/month to read news in almost any place…nor are they likely to hand over their email to a “freemium” service, just for a class. It’s not reasonable to ask a student to get a monthly subscription, just so they can read your course materials.
So I started Googling…can I share a Medium story with a non-member and a non-account holder? Could I share a link to a story, like it was a link to my website, that did not require an email address, or signing up to receive “free” content forever? And then I started testing it: if I share a link, will it just open, without the paywall, or the login page?
It turns out there is a way through Medium to do this. Casey Botticello wrote an article years ago with instructions…thankfully Medium has not changed this part of their platform; all the same features are still in the same place and do the same thing.
Here’s why I wanted to use Medium for this task:
- Podcast player. I wanted to be able to share links directly to Spotify and Apple Podcasts so that students could just click on a button to hear great audio.
To do this, the platform needs to support <iframes> which Medium is great for. You cannot do it with email. Google Docs or Word allow a hyperlink, but no image, and no play button.
An iframe link in Medium shows the cover art and the play button; two small details but they make a big difference to the student experience. If students have to look too hard for something, they might not get there.
Here’s what I mean:
2. Hyperlink to resources for download. I had resources and worksheets for them to download.
Lots of places allow for this, provided that you have an online storage spot (which could be your own website, or even just a Google Drive with the Share link correctly switched to Anyone With Link). But having it next to the podcast player made it convenient and all in one place.
3. Images and Information Graphics. I have charts and workflows in an image for them to ponder (like the above example).
Sure, you can put an image inside an email, but some email providers think it’s spam. Yes, you could make this a PDF document, and then email it around, but then you lose all the other functionality.
Medium allows for images of all shapes and sizes, and they optimize them for the readers, which makes it all load evenly. Plus, it further adds to the functionality of the earlier points.
4. Short clips of a podcast to listen to in class. As a teaching tool, I wanted to share a series of 30-second videos, which were actually animated clips of a podcast.
To get to this point, it was a few steps.
From the This American Life website >> Share Clip >> export to Vimeo >> share >> export as an iframe >> embed in my Medium article.
While it took a few extra steps, it made for a dynamic teaching experience of listening to a podcast. Here’s what that looked like:
So why have you never heard of this?
Likely because there’s some good and some bad about unlisted articles.
Bad:
- The Unlisted feature does nothing to help your Medium stats
- They are not part of the Partner Program, which means that no one earns from them
- They aren’t likely to help you grow your fans and claps and follows.
Good:
- Medium still tracks the stats of unlisted articles, so you can see how many students are accessing this work
- There’s no “10 free article” limit which will lock students out
- Students don’t need a Medium account, which is likely a barrier to entry
- It still looks exactly like the Medium page and does link out to your Paid stories, if you want readers to click over the paywall
- You can delete, remove, or make the article part of the Partner Program any time you choose.
If you have come to love and depend on all the functionality and authorship of Medium articles as I have, it’s hard to get away from it; trust me, I went looking for an alternative. There’s nothing reasonable, short of making my own website from scratch.
The truth is that there’s nothing quite like Medium out there, and this is just another way for you to use Medium for all the things that you do.
Samantha Hodder is an audio producer and writer. If you love narrative podcasts as much as I do, subscribe to my Substack Bingeworthy.
