Are The Cracks in Medium’s ‘New Ingenious System’ Already Starting to Show?

Medium, don’t spoil this for yourself!

It’s around a week since the new Friend of Medium thingie was announced and I joined up enthusiastically. After all, this is about supporting other writers.

And because we’re a flipping fantastic community of supportive writers, many others have also acquired that cute heart badge on their profiles, and we can all feel as if we’re holding hands in a great big global family of true friends! If we’re feeling really brave, that may manifest in a giant group hug!

Of course, none of us thought we were joining to merely give away money and not see some of it come flooding right back to us. So, here are my observations from the first few days:

In the first couple of days — the final days of November — it was reflected immediately in my earnings in a positive way.

And then December hit and…it seemed as if I had gone back to 2021 when I had barely any followers and struggled to get views. Exactly like that!

Oh, but then I published something and I had a little injection of views and moolah, followed by…flop!! My views and my earnings yoyo between KAZIIIING and spectacularly crap.

I wondered — is this a pattern? A game? Was this Medium’s little way of saying “we’re tightening the purse strings but if you want to pay each other a little more then cough up more wonga, we’ll distribute it, but in the fits and starts that we decide upon?”

Now, I haven’t had a boosted piece since I became a Friend of Medium so I can’t say how that has been affected. Presumably the same “boost” algorithm as ever is at work, in which we rake up an injection of views and dollars and then our little stats mountain falls off a cliff.

I know it’s too early to say but it is looking remarkably as if Medium is trying to do one over on us and hoping this little trick will be smothered over by the intermittent Friend of Medium cash injections. But some of us have been in this game for long enough now to not take any changes Medium implements without a large handful of salt. Be warned, Medium — it may not pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

As Buster Benson stated in a recent article on the Partner Programme earnings, “Our recommendation is that the Partner Program is considered a supplement, rather than a replacement, to a consistent and predictable full-time income.” — That’s all very well, but for many of us, writing on Medium has become a part of our monthly earnings and the time we spend here reflects that. In the long run, if Medium doesn’t want to have to pay writers well for high quality stories, then they need to be prepared for those mass exoduses of writers when things turn shit — as they seem to do at reliably regular intervals.

There’s no two ways about it; writers, like any creatives, either feel appreciated and keep producing, or they feel exploited and go elsewhere.

I am certainly still happy to be committing to my part in supporting the writer community with a Friend of Medium membership, but in the long run, it’s got to be more worth it than going to spend my extra membership fees in Substack subscriptions to some of the excellent writers with newsletters there. Which means that I have to see that the Medium algorithm hasn’t merely returned to spectacular crapness as a general rule.

So don’t stop showing up for us yet, Medium. Keep working at it — you can do it!