Medium can put your writing in front of thousands of strangers before you have a single subscriber, and Substack almost never will. That is the best argument for Medium. It is also the reason so many writers who start there end up leaving. Reach on Medium belongs to Medium. A reader who finds you through its feed is a reader the platform can send somewhere else tomorrow, and you never learn that person’s email address.
So the Medium vs Substack question is less about which one pays more and more about what you are building. Medium works like a magazine you contribute to. Substack works like a publication you own, with a billing system and a mailing list attached. Both can make you money, and both can waste a year of your writing if you pick the one that does not match your goal.
Below is how each platform pays in 2026, what the fees look like on real numbers, who keeps the readers when you leave, where new readers come from, and a three-question test for deciding.
How Medium and Substack pay writers
Medium pays through its Partner Program, and the money comes out of a shared pool funded by member dues. A standard membership costs $5 a month or $50 a year. The Friend of Medium tier costs $15 a month or $150 a year, and Medium says writers earn four times more when those members read their stories.
To earn, you need to be a paying Medium member yourself, have at least one published story, keep a complete profile, be 18 or older, and bank in one of the supported countries. There is no follower threshold and no application review. Once enrolled, you put stories behind the paywall, and you earn when members read them for 30 seconds or longer. Pay rises with member reading time and with claps, highlights, replies and follows. Stories that Medium’s curators Boost earn more per read, and recent changes added higher rates for members who arrive from outside traffic, from search engines like Google, and from the email notifications Medium sends to your subscribers. A non-member who signs up to read your story now triggers a one-time bonus. That replaced the 2021 to 2025 referral program, which paid writers a recurring share of each new member’s dues.
What Medium does not do is publish a rate. Your earnings depend on what members read, how long they stay, and how the pool gets divided that month. Medium has adjusted the formula several times since January 2025, and writers on the platform track each change closely because a single update can move their income.
Substack works the other way around. Publishing is free at any size, you set the price, and readers pay you directly. When you turn on paid subscriptions, Substack keeps 10% of each payment. Stripe then charges its own processing fees, which Substack lists as 2.9% plus $0.30 per payment for US cards and 0.7% for recurring billing. A custom domain is a one-time $50. That is the whole fee schedule.
The difference matters more than the percentages. Medium pays you for attention you did not have to sell. Substack pays you only for readers you persuaded to pay, but it pays you the same way every month, on terms you can read in a single help article.
What does the money look like at small scale?
Substack’s math is easy to run because every input is public. Take an $8 monthly subscription. Substack keeps $0.80. Stripe takes about $0.23 in card fees plus the $0.30 flat charge, and around $0.06 for billing. You keep roughly $6.61, or about 83% of the sticker price.
Annual plans do better. An $80 annual subscription loses $8.00 to Substack, about $2.62 to Stripe’s card fee, and about $0.56 to billing. You keep about $68.82, or 86%, because the flat 30 cents is charged once instead of twelve times. That is why most established Substack writers push annual plans hard at checkout.
Scale that up and the picture gets concrete. Two hundred paid subscribers at $8 a month comes to about $1,322 a month after fees. A thousand comes to about $6,600. Those numbers tell you exactly how many paying readers you need to replace a salary, a retainer, or a marketing budget.
For a sense of how many writers get there, Stripe’s case study on Substack reports more than 5 million paid subscriptions and more than 50,000 active paid publications. That works out to an average of roughly 100 paid subscriptions per paid publication. Averages hide a steep curve, and a subscription is not the same as a unique person, but it is a useful reality check. Most paid Substacks are small businesses, not media empires.
Medium has no equivalent calculation. You cannot forecast earnings from a story before you publish it, and two stories with similar views can pay very different amounts depending on how many readers were members and how long they stayed. In exchange, Medium can pay you something from your first paywalled story, with no subscribers at all. Substack pays nothing until someone decides you are worth a monthly charge.
Who owns the audience when you leave?
This is the section that decides the Medium vs Substack debate for most professionals, and it gets the least attention.
Substack lets you export your full publication data at any time. That includes your posts as CSV and HTML files, your complete subscriber list, and optional stats. Paid subscriptions run through a Stripe account connected to your publication, which is what makes it possible to carry paying readers to another platform that also bills through Stripe. If Substack changed its fees, its policies, or its ownership tomorrow, you could leave with every email address and every paying customer.
Medium’s export is a different thing. According to its help center, Medium gives you your personal data and your stories as HTML files in a zip archive. It is a backup of your writing, not a mailing list you can take to another provider. Your followers stay on Medium. Medium will email your new stories to people who subscribe to you, and since late 2025 it pays more for reads that come from those emails, but you never see the addresses.
For a hobby writer, that may not matter. For a founder, a consultant, or anyone writing to build a business, it is the whole game. An email list is the one audience asset that survives algorithm changes, platform pivots, and the next shiny network. A follower count on someone else’s site is a number you are borrowing.
Where do new readers come from on each platform?
Medium’s strength is distribution to people who have never heard of you. Stories surface in readers’ feeds by topic, publications can pick up your work and put it in front of their followers, and Medium’s curators decide which stories get Boosted to wider audiences. Medium stories also rank in Google, and the platform now pays writers more for members who arrive from search. If you write evergreen, searchable material, such as tutorials, explainers, or technical guides, Medium can keep sending readers to a story for years.
Substack’s discovery works more like word of mouth with infrastructure. Writers recommend each other’s publications, and those recommendations appear when someone subscribes. Notes, Substack’s short-form feed, gives you a place to post between issues and get picked up by readers who already use the app. Growth on Substack tends to come from three sources: other writers who recommend you, your own promotion on LinkedIn or podcasts or wherever your audience already is, and readers forwarding issues they liked.
The pattern holds across both platforms. Medium hands you reach and keeps the relationship. Substack hands you the relationship and expects you to go find the reach.
The Rent or Deed Test
To settle the Medium vs Substack question, I use what I call the Rent or Deed Test. It is three questions, and each answer tells you whether you are renting an audience or holding the deed to one.
The first question: if the platform disappeared tomorrow, could you email every reader you have? On Substack the answer is yes. On Medium the answer is no. That is a deed answer and a rent answer.
The second question: does your income depend on a formula you cannot see? Substack’s fee is published and fixed. Medium’s payouts depend on a pool and a weighting system that the company adjusts, and has adjusted repeatedly. Fixed terms are a deed. A formula that changes under you is rent.
The third question: who decides who sees your next piece? On Substack, your subscribers get it in their inbox whether or not the app’s feed favors it. On Medium, curators and the feed decide how far a story travels beyond your followers. Substack scores partly here, too, since its own app and recommendations shape discovery, so call this one mixed.
Count your deed answers for each platform against what you need. Rent is not bad. Renting makes sense when you have no audience yet, want to test topics fast, or want to write without running a business. Holding the deed makes sense when the writing is supposed to produce clients, sales, speaking invitations, or a book deal, because every one of those outcomes depends on being able to reach the same people again.
Run both without splitting yourself in half
Plenty of writers do not choose. They use Medium for reach and Substack for ownership, and the setup is simpler than it sounds.
Publish on Substack first, so your subscribers get the piece and your Substack URL is the original. A few days later, bring selected pieces to Medium with its Import a story tool. Medium’s help center says imported stories are backdated to the original date and get a canonical link to the source automatically, which tells search engines that the Substack version is the original.
Pick what to cross-post with intent. Evergreen pieces with search potential do well on Medium for a long time. Timely analysis, personal updates, and subscriber-only material belong on Substack. End every Medium story with a short line inviting readers to subscribe on Substack, with the link. Over months, that line turns Medium’s rented reach into readers you own.
Decide on the paywall per story. A story behind Medium’s paywall earns Partner Program money, but non-members hit a wall, which can slow the funnel to your list. Many writers keep their best funnel pieces free on Medium and paywall the rest.
Watch your time, too. Running two platforms well means two sets of comments, two analytics dashboards, and two places readers expect to hear from you. If you can only keep one going, keep the one with the deed.
Which writers should pick which?
Medium fits writers who want to test ideas before committing to a newsletter, technical writers whose tutorials get searched, people who enjoy writing but have no interest in selling subscriptions, and anyone who wants some income from their first month without building an audience first. It also fits writers who would rather let editors and curators handle distribution.
Substack fits experts building a business around their thinking: consultants, analysts, founders, coaches, and authors with a book coming. It fits anyone with an existing following elsewhere who wants to convert it into an asset. It also fits writers who podcast or record video, since Substack supports both inside the same publication.
Founders and executives building a personal brand should lean Substack, then use Medium as an amplifier. The goal for that group is rarely subscription revenue. It is a list of people who know your name, read your thinking, and remember you when they need what you sell. A list does that. A view count does not.
Here is the move for this week. Open a Substack if you do not have one, import your three best Medium stories with Substack’s importer, and add a one-line subscribe link to the end of every Medium story you have already published. Then check your subscriber count in 30 days. That number is the audience you own, and it is the one to grow.