FreeCodeCamp Moves Off of Medium after being Pressured to Put Articles Behind Paywalls

After four years of publishing on Medium, FreeCodeCamp is migrating all of its articles to its own open source publishing platform, a modified version of Ghost. The platform allows approved authors to cross-post their blog articles on the new FreeCodeCamp News site for free, without any ads.

“Medium was a great place to publish because it helped a lot of people discover your articles. But the community has outgrown Medium,” FreeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson said.

“Medium has shifted to a paywall model where they mainly recommend paywalled articles, then encourage visitors to pay to get around their paywall.

“At the same time, not much of the traffic to Medium articles comes from Medium itself. Most of it comes from Google and social media.”

In the detailed public announcement on the FreeCodeCamp forums, Larson said he noticed his articles started to get less distribution after he decided that putting them behind a paywall would not be compatible with the mission of his organization.

“As of 2019, Medium won’t give you much ‘distribution’ within their platform unless you’re willing to put your articles to be behind their paywall,” Larson said. “At the same time, if you do put your article behind their paywall, you’re limiting your readership to just the people who have the resources to pay. This is at odds with the goals of the freeCodeCamp community. We want to make these learning resources as widely available as possible.”

In an email to blog authors who had published on FreeCodeCamp’s Medium publication, Larson elaborated on more serious concerns that he had with the platform’s approach to his organization. Oleg Isonen, one of the blog authors, published the contents of the email, which was later deleted at Larson’s request.

“But over the past year Medium had become more aggressive toward us,” Larson said. “They have pressured us to put our articles behind their paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us. (Which makes no sense. We’re a public charity.) We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.”

Many of those who read the email encouraged Larson to write a follow-up article, as Medium’s tactics towards publishers are a matter of legitimate public concern, both to those who use the platform and readers who support the company through subscriptions.

Larson responded, confirming that he sent the email but that he wanted to move on from the situation.

This email was intended only for Oleg and a few of our other authors. I have messaged him asking to delete it. We are focused on the future and want to move on from this.

— Quincy Larson (@ossia) May 31, 2019

The new freeCodeCamp News site has migrated the organization’s 5,000 articles that were previously posted on Medium. The articles will still be available on Medium, but from now on freeCodeCamp plans to publish on its own platform. The site promises users full control, better analytics, AMP support, and a better reader experience that doesn’t require people to sign in or pay to read articles.

“I’m optimistic that all of us in the developer community can start our own blogs on the open web, then use community tools like freeCodeCamp News to raise awareness of them,” Larson said.

Medium abruptly changed course in 2017 to become a publisher of subscription-based content, scrapping the ad-driven revenue model without notifying publishers ahead of time. Many publications that had invested heavily in building a following on Medium were forced to leave after discovering that the company did not have their best interests in mind. Medium’s new paywalled content model, which CEO Ev Williams claims is “a different, bolder approach” targeted at fixing what is broken with media, could not sustain publishers who were convinced to join the platform in its earlier days.

FreeCodeCamp joins a wave of other publications that are moving back to WordPress and other open source platforms. This trend is set to continue as Medium’s obtrusive popups and poor reader experience drive readers away from the content hosted there. Publishers who are in it for the long haul, those who value stability and full control of their content, will return to the open web.