Medium stories on any website.

Medium has never shipped a public read API for non-RSS access. There is an unauthenticated GraphQL endpoint that powers the medium.com frontend, but it is undocumented, rate-limited aggressively, blocked by IP for repeated automated requests, and explicitly off-limits under Medium's Terms of Service. Every widget tool that claims to read Medium content via something other than RSS is either scraping that GraphQL endpoint and praying it stays up, or scraping the rendered HTML, which Medium routinely changes. The official, supported, and only durable integration path is RSS at medium.com/feed/@username for profiles, medium.com/feed/publication-slug for publications, and medium.com/feed/tag/topic for tag streams. Poper parses that RSS feed. When Medium redesigns the site, ships a new homepage layout, or rotates internal endpoints, the RSS contract stays stable because it has not meaningfully changed since 2014. The trade-off: RSS exposes the most recent 10 stories per feed by default, which is plenty for a homepage embed but not enough if you want to display a full archive. For archives, paginated multi-feed merging is required, and Poper handles that on Pro and Business plans by stitching together adjacent feeds (your profile feed plus your publication feed, for example) into one chronologically sorted stream.

The Medium Partner Program pays writers based on member reading time on their stories. As of 2026, Medium has restructured the program three times since 2017, and the current rules require 100 followers, 1 personal Medium domain or claimed handle, and an active Stripe account. Crucially, member reading time only accrues on medium.com itself, not on third-party embeds. That means if a visitor reads your full story inside a Medium feed widget on your own site, you earn zero from the Partner Program for that read. This sounds bad until you realize that the entire purpose of embedding Medium on your own site is to capture audience attention on a domain you own, not to monetize reads on a domain Medium owns. The right mental model: Medium is a discovery engine and a writing tool, your site is the brand and the conversion surface. Honest widgets handle this correctly. Poper renders public posts in full because they do not generate Partner Program revenue anyway. Member-only stories show a clear member-only badge with a link out to Medium, where actual member reads do count toward your earnings. Widgets that fake-render member-only teasers inside the embed are simultaneously cannibalizing your Partner Program revenue and giving readers an unsatisfying half-story experience. Avoid them.

Medium for Publishers lets publications run on custom domains so the public URL hides medium.com entirely. A reader visits journal.companyname.com and sees a clean branded experience, but under the hood the publication is still hosted on Medium and the RSS feed still lives at medium.com/feed/publication-slug. The complication for widget tools: when you paste journal.companyname.com into a widget builder, the tool needs to resolve that custom domain back to the underlying Medium publication slug before it can pull RSS. Most third-party widgets do not handle this and either reject the URL or pull the wrong feed. Poper resolves custom-domain Medium publications by following redirects and reading the canonical link tag in the publication's homepage HTML, which Medium injects automatically. Paste journal.companyname.com, Poper detects it is a Medium publication on a custom domain, looks up the underlying slug, and embeds the correct feed. Your embed reflects exactly what is published, even when the public URL is fully white-labeled. This matters most for company blogs that migrated TO Medium specifically because they wanted the writing tool and reader network without the medium.com branding showing on every page.

Medium's organic reach for individual writers has measurably declined since 2023. The shift started when Medium pivoted away from algorithmic distribution toward editor-curated publications and Boost-eligible stories, which means most writers without an existing audience now see story-level traffic 50 to 80 percent lower than 2021 numbers. The Medium Partner Program payout formula changed three times in the same window, generally reducing per-read earnings. Many established writers have publicly migrated to Substack or self-hosted stacks like Ghost or even back to WordPress. This is not a reason to abandon Medium, since Medium is still excellent as a writing tool and still has a real reader network, but it is a strong reason to mirror your Medium content on your own site. If Medium continues its current trajectory and your audience increasingly finds you through Google search or direct visits to your site rather than the Medium homepage, your owned domain becomes the durable channel and your Medium handle becomes a syndication mirror. A medium feed widget makes that strategy automatic. New Medium posts appear on your site within an hour of publishing, your homepage stays fresh without manual cross-posting, and if you decide to migrate to Substack or Ghost in the future, your readers were on your site, not Medium, all along. This is the boring but correct posture for any writer or publication that takes their audience seriously in 2026.

Many writers ask whether they should pick Medium or Substack in 2026, and the honest answer is most working writers should publish on both. Substack owns the email-newsletter conversion path and the paid-subscription monetization model. Medium owns the discovery network and the long-form writing tool. The two surfaces target different reader behaviors: Substack readers subscribe and receive your work in their inbox, Medium readers browse and click. Dual publishing is straightforward as long as you publish to Substack first, then republish to Medium with a canonical link back to the Substack version, which protects SEO and credits the original. A medium feed widget on your own site complements this dual-publishing setup by giving you a third surface, your own domain, where both audiences can land and see your latest work. Add a Substack newsletter widget alongside the Medium feed and you have a single homepage block that shows recent posts and a subscribe form, which is the tightest possible conversion funnel for a writer with both surfaces active. Poper ships both widgets and they share styling primitives, so the typography, spacing, and color palette stay consistent whether the post lives on Medium or Substack. If you eventually want to walk away from Medium entirely, the same Poper feed widget configuration works against a Ghost feed or a Hashnode feed by changing one URL, which keeps the migration cost close to zero.