A couple of weeks ago I decided to do a little experiment: post the exact same article on 3 different media outlets: Steemit, Yours.org and Medium. The goal of the experiment was to understand how and in which way each of these media channels are helping an author.

The article is China Forbidding ICOs: Why This Is A Good Thing For The Crypto Ecosystem (that's the Steemit link). Here are the Yours and Medium links as well:

• Yours China Forbidding ICOs: Why This Is A Good Thing For The Crypto Ecosystem
• Medium China Forbidding ICOs: Why This Is A Good Thing For The Crypto Ecosystem

Before giving you the results, a few words about each of these channels (excluding Steemit, obviously, since I assume you know how this works)

• Yours is a publishing platform which pays with Bitcoin Cash (!) and it is in a very early stage, although it was announced at least one year ago. In order to generate revenue, one must tip the author of an article, by upvoting. This process triggers a transaction by which a certain amount of BCC (established by the author of the post) is transferred to the author.
• Medium is a veteran in online publishing, but recently it was also doing baby steps in the pay-per-post area. There is a metric called "clap" (a sign of appreciation, basically a vote) which can be transferred into money, by using a special fund. Honestly, this was way too complicated for me to do further research. The process of becoming a beneficiary of this fund is also complicated and it's not decentralized at all (you must be "approved").

After one week, here are the results:

• Steemit post made $17.91 (off of which there was also curation, so probably around $12). It was read by 80 people, had 20 comments and received 101 votes
• Yours.org post made a whopping 10cents, by receiving one upvote
• Medium post made 0 in revenue, generated 6 fans and it was read by 169 persons

Partial Conclusions

This experiment was way too simple to generate consistent conclusions, so I decided to call them "partial conclusions", a fancy term for my own biased opinions. But as biased as they may be, these partial conclusions may turn useful for somebody, so here they are:

• Steemit is by far the winner, simply because it actually pays
• Yours is way too young to be considered by a serious author, unless you're just copy-pasting your articles, hoping Google will not penalize you for duplicate content
• Medium is the leader of the "vanity" metrics: you get fans, readers but zero revenue. Don't get me wrong, even if you don't get direct revenue, a high-profile medium author can still make some money by old fashion "audience based" tricks: selling courses, speaking gigs, etc, but these are somehow on top of the writing itself, which is not an asset anymore, but a marketing expense.
• I think Yours made a very big strategy mistake by limiting themselves to Bitcoin Cash
• No matter which platform you use, creating and maintaining an audience is still your job. No matter how advanced a publishing platform is, it won't bring you the audience, you have to work for that.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):

• Rewards: Were Does The Money Come From?
• Netiquette: How To Avoid Being A Steem Douche?
• Witnesses: What Are They And Why Should You Care?
• How Can I Mine Steem And What CPU / GPU Power Do I Need For That?