Medium Gone Wild: Earnings & Engagement Edition

I’ve got some answers to WTF is happening on Medium

Cot damn, Medium’s been wildin’ out over the last few days over the sudden plummeting of earnings, and a comment from the CEO about engagement. And people are freaking the fork out, especially in lieu of an explanation from Medium.

But let’s slow our roll my Pilsbury peeps. Take a deep breath with me. While some are hotter than a fajita plate, I’m cool as a cucumber — and I’ll explain why (including what I heard from Medium themselves). But let’s start at the beginning.

So, just over a week ago, a lot of us saw a drop in daily earnings. But since earnings on this platform go up and down like a drunk seesaw we all just seemed to think we were having a shitty day. Then we realized a LOT of people were having shitty days, and they kept coming. When people realized it was a lot of people (if not almost all?) and it was more than 50% (some say 70%) of earnings — we have a problem.

So, Jenny Lane mustered up her massive cajones and asked Medium’s CEO, and future frontman for ZZ Top, Tony Stubblebine about it. She commented on his post about AI ‘yo fam, wassup with the earnings being down bro?’ (I may have paraphrased a little), he responded with this:

And people lost their shit.

His comment certainly lacked the ‘nuance’ that Medium is such a proponent of — which he noted himself when he said it wasn’t the most tactful response. Well, at least he wasn’t wrong, it did.

So, why wasn’t I losing my shit too? Because I see both sides.

Tony’s not necessarily wrong if you look at it from an inauthentic engagement lens. There is inauthentic engagement happening. Albeit Medium shouldn’t be shocked, what did they think would happen when they made engagement a calculation in earnings? Helen Keller could’ve seen that coming.

The reason people were mad is that some of us aren’t engaging inauthentically. We’re just Medium junkies who are addicted to this dang place. We run pubs, groups and niche-based communities around it. And we support each other.

Two things happened here, one, some people didn’t understand the ‘rate limiting’ thing, and two — they were hurt, they love this place and the communities they’ve created. As a CEO, Tony should be insanely proud of how passionate people are, and the communities created around the platform. His words hurt the hardcore mofos who utterly love this place. I think much of the anger came from hurt feelings (and money too, of course).

Rate Limiting

Rate limiting isn’t new, it’s always been there. It means that there is a cap on how much a single reader can pay out to the writers they read.

Let me explain. Medium is a revenue-sharing platform. It charges users $5/month. It then takes some of that to keep the lights on (servers, employees, accountants, company Bat-Signals, time machines, etc), and puts the rest into the writers' payout pool.

Let me help illustrate this with a visual of the payout pool:

Now that we know what an earnings pool looks like, let’s get back to the numbers. I don’t know exactly how they divvy up the $5/month up, but let’s just use 50/50 as an example. So each user generates $2.50 for the earnings pool.

That user has $2.50 to ‘spend’ with all their reads for the month.

Some people think the more you read, the more you pay the writers, endlessly — but if that were the case, Medium would have gone broke about 2.7 hours after launching the MPP. This is ‘rate limiting’, but if it helps think of it as ‘Medium-don’t-go-broke-iting’.

As far as I understand, the weighting of which author gets how much of that two-fiddy is where engagement plays a factor (and a bunch of other confusing formulas, like the square root of what women want, divided by Pi). Clapping/commenting/highlighting/following doesn’t pay endlessly, so for those who are chintzy and dole out engagement less, the authors they do engage with earn a little more.

But this is pennies or fractions of pennies.

Unless you’re only reading 2.5 stories per month and engage with all of them equally, each one would get $1 in that scenario. Most of us read more than that of course, a lot more. For the people worried that their engagement suddenly isn’t paying authors anymore (or hurting them in a negative way) don’t worry. It pays individual writers less just because you’re spreading the love around like a free-loving hippy. Smaller payments, but to more writers.

Since it’s based on a very lenient limit though, this equates to (fractions of) pennies difference — even with an adjustment to the rate-limiting that has always been in existence.

So, Why The Earnings Drop?

If it wasn’t rate limiting, or a devaluing of engagement — what was it? Well, in my chat group, I got a response from Medium. Well, sort of, because…Medium. And here is what I was told:

‘We’ve heard of the problem, and it should be smoothed over this week if the problem is what we think it is.’

Ok, it’s not a great explanation. However, as they had to look for the problem — it doesn’t sound like it was anything planned. Maybe someone adjusted some algorithm and as tech things often do, something else broke. Tech can be a bit like playing that game Whac-A-Mole. You fix one thing and it breaks another.

For me, this is good news, because it wasn’t some purposeful evil maniacal change to the payout calculation. It was an ‘oops’. If you’re thinking — this is money, there shouldn’t be any ‘oopsy fucking daisy’s’. Well, yeah. But that’s not how tech works.

Also, did you know that Medium as a company is only like 80 people? That surprised me. But it also explains a lot, as at that size you don’t have Google-level continuity (Google has around 200,000 people, to give you a little scale here).

I also think that’s why a couple of times a month Medium glitches like it’s part of The Matrix. Hands up if you also semi-panic for a microsecond every time Medium won’t load for you?

Conclusion

It seems like it was just a big whoopsy-doopsy-something-fucked-up-poopsy. And a less-than-nuanced response from the CEO really stoked the fires. This isn’t to say Medium doesn’t have problems (how much time have you got?), but for this one…I’m as cool as a cucumber. Just breathe, they’re fixing the Bat-Signal.

If you peeps want to know something I’m actually concerned about…

It’s how much they’re paying boosted posts. With boosted posts earning exponentially more (they can pay like 10X!) — in a program that’s getting a lot bigger, quickly…what do you think is going to happen to that finite earnings pool above? That money has to come from somewhere.

Don’t be worried about fractions of pennies, be more concerned with exponentially boosted posts draining the pool.

UPDATE: Hi, this is me from the future. I time-travelled back to this article to provide an update (if you want the cliff notes instead: there was a fraudulent attack on the earning program from swashbuckling ass pirates):