Curation On Medium Changed — This Is What You Should Know
You’re still on time to make it on Medium
You might’ve noticed in the past few weeks that something’s happened with the process of being curated on Medium.
What I’ve observed is that I get directly curated in the bigger publications at the moment they accept my story, and for the rest, I’m put on hold
I’m talking about the smaller publications I get published in. I’m still waiting for stories that are 2–3 weeks old to be curated — or not.
I’m still hanging tight. Well, not as tight as in the beginning when I was refreshing the stats every hour to see if I was curated.
Now, I almost forgot about those stories floating around in the sea of “We are processing this story.” I’m curious about your experience. I had some discussion with peer writers on Facebook groups, and they confirmed this.
How could this have happened? What changed Mediums curation strategy? How will it affect your success as a writer, and what can you do?
My Theory
I have a theory — no proof, just a theory. An assumption, really, based on my own experience on Medium and reading lots of stories about this subject.
Medium has 120 million readers and is growing. It has around 30,000 writers and is probably explosively growing. Medium is moving slowly towards the downwards-going slope of the early majority phase. I got this term from a graph that shows the life cycle for new technologies.
Medium is technology of the 21st century for blog content.
Here is the graph
What does this tell us, passionate Medium writers and readers?
When you see the graph, it’s my intuition we’re a little on the right side of the top of the mountain. Again, I have no proof. I look at the amount of time Medium has been around and how many subscribers there are and then distill some kind of policy out of how the algorithms behave. I’m fully aware I’ll never win the competition with the algos, but they do challenge me to stay alert and on top of the game.
We are skiing down into the valley of the late majority, and we’re still very much enjoying our time here.
To understand my theory, we need to look first at what happened in the early adopter's phase.
Medium’s early adoption phase
In the early adoption phase, the writers who stepped in then, like in 2013, have been getting the early adoption reward for some period now. They’re skyrocketing into Medium heaven.
They had all that time to build their own platform, their followers, their publication, and to jump into the perfect niche since there wasn’t that much competition around.
They trusted the platform to stick around and grow, and this trust is now being rewarded. They cocreated Medium as it is today. A few names I follow and read almost daily are August Birch, Shannon Ashley, umair haque, Tim Denning, Ayodeji Awosika, and Jessica Wildfire.
In this phase, Medium needed to become known on the internet, and I only can guess with fewer writers, you got curated a lot.
Curation equals artistic reward. Reward sparks motivation. You tell friends to start writing on Medium.
And the main thing: Curation equals financial reward, too. After building up your audience in periods like even less than six months, writers were earning 2, 3, or even 4k. Compare this with the phase with Facebook where ads just came out, and the people mastering them made tons of money.
The main thing that sticks out with Medium is you can’t trick anybody — your quality needs to stand out. With Facebook you paid for your content to be pushed through to people that couldn’t discern between a friend’s post and sponsored content.
In order to make a good paycheck on Medium, however, you need to do the work, show up, improve your writing skills, fill your niche, and continue to bring value. It’s as simple as that, and that won’t change.
Medium today: The top of the early majority
Now let's speed forward again to this phase I assume we’re in. The very slowly going downward descent. There’s no worries when you’re a newbie — you’re still good. You still can profit from the late majority.
But Medium, just a few weeks ago, has made it more difficult for you to get curated. Why?
There can be a few reasons:
- The amount of contributors to Medium is still increasing, but the new-readers ratio is very slowly going down, like the curve in the graph. There are fewer readers to read curated pieces, and, as a result, writers that made it into the big publications will be chosen first.
- My gist is that Medium curators are actually part of bigger publications, so they read through incoming work that probably has past some smart algorithms first. This way, Medium catches two fish at once.
- In the development phase that Medium is in right now, the platform is increasingly giving more attention to quality than newcomers. The product — read well-known and well-read publications — is ready, and the level of expectation by its readers continuously must be met.
This last point makes me think Medium is turning slowly into a content pyramid. This simply means the early adopters and people from the start of the early majority will keep on earning big numbers, and eventually a writer elite in Medium will be formed. I might be wrong, of course. I’ll come back to this later.
What does this mean for the different groups of writers that entered this Mecca of blogdom in different phases?
- The early adopters: They’re more than fine. They cocreated Medium. They make big numbers. They eventually will become the writer elite and make even more fat paychecks. They fully deserve that. Note: They also need to maintain their level of high-end quality pieces. They’re the layer of truly professionals.
- The people that almost only write about writing and making it on Medium: This group is part of the early adopters, but a bigger part is the early majority. In this phase that started about 1.5-2 years ago, there was this big wave of new incoming writers that continued to grow. What easier way is there to get claps and new reads than by teaching how to write good content (exactly what Medium wants)? In the process, they move up the income ladder.
- The early majority that doesn’t write about writing on Medium: That’s me, and this piece is an exception. I entered the Medium universe in March 2018 but started to take blogging on Medium really serious only three months ago. If you’re similar, I believe you’re still fine. You need to work harder and show up more than the early adopters, but when this is really where your calling is, you have a chance to make it on Medium. Curation is getting harder for you now when you’re not accepted in The Startup, Better Marketing, The Ascent, or the other biggies where I assume curators are active.
- The early majority that’ll flow in the coming months and years (mid-2020 and into 2021): They’re starting at the bottom of the pyramid, and only real proven talent will shoot up. But they might leave Medium soon to get a book contract since they’re a real talent. You need to build your platform first on Medium — till you start making numbers — just like in the real world. In the coming phase, this might take twice as long or more. More people will give up when there are fewer pieces being curated. It all adds up. Medium focuses on quality publications, monetizes them in more clever ways, and will favour the elite over newcomers since they, and this is a sad thing to say, don’t need them that much anymore.
I must note, again, these are all my own opinions and assumptions, and I welcome each and every new writer on this fantastic heaven for blogs. Only the future will tell how your own experience on this platform will go. There are still changes for you.
Let me round off by explaining what I mean by pyramid.
The content pyramids of the new age of technology
Is it possible that Medium will become a new content-tech company like Facebook and Google? They have become huge data pyramids.
I like reading stuff about how to write and how to make it on Medium, but I have the impression Medium is literally flooded with these pieces. This is, in fact, the danger of a content pyramid.
When a true elite is established, and curation gets harder, it’ll get more challenging to become successful.
More and more people will write about how to make it on Medium since the masses under the elite are struggling increasingly to become successful. The quality content pieces will suffer from this, and the overall quality of the platform will decrease.
Medium will have to figure out a way to prevent this.
The value of the platform is in bringing forward words that matter, not in creating a blogging competition to get some bucks.
Once you have settled at the top, it’s very appealing to write about how to get there. People will reflect on you; see you as the authority that, in fact, you are; and will follow you since they want what you have.
Sadly, for the late majority, they never will get there — or only a few of them will. Why?
Think of a pyramid. It gets very narrow at the top. Only a few fit there. Also, the layers under the top will be taken soon. Still, the people at the top sell their knowledge and skills to the masses underneath them. This is natural because it makes them stay at the top. It’s baked into our economic system.
It’s the story of the influencer in our attention economy:
The influencer at the top of the pyramid with 1,000 balls teaches you how to get there, but you need to pay him one ball first. This is how he got the 1,000 balls in the first place.
You need to decide for yourself If you want to take up the challenge to get there. Just know there isn’t that much room at the top.
The ball in Medium for the top writers is the time you spend reading articles on how to make it to the top. Your time pays writing peers and vice versa.
Maybe you don’t have that ambition at all — you’re fine with a piece a week, and you love writing better pieces every week. For me, learning to hit the blogging nail definitely has been my goal for the past three months. I didn’t care much about the money.
When you’re ambitious and you’re just getting started, this story teaches you to do everything you can to get into a bigger publication where curators work.
I mentioned a few above. To do this, your artwork has to rock and shine.
I just come out of that phase. I wrote 72 blogs in three months and recently had a great wave of improvement. I believe our Medium generation, the ones started in 2019, still can make it. I’m not blind to the pyramid system, though.
Funnily enough, my publication on Medium “Spirit of Crypto” is about how we can change this. I believe it’s through the movement of decentralization. Medium is a company — I’d be in awe if one day it moved into a more decentralized economic model. But we’re not there yet.
The structure of Medium doesn’t allow just a few CEOs to make billions over our blood, sweat, and words. That’s because of the quality the content of the platform is made out off and the absence of ads. And I love that.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it, folks. I’m passionate about writing on Medium — I read many blogs myself every day. What I like about Medium is its quietness, the absence of ads, the contacts I make with my fellow writers and my readers, and the chances it gives to improve our skills. And at the end of the day, it allows you to make some fine money.
A few weeks back, I was afraid I got into curation jail. I decided to keep on writing, for a long time if necessary, and trusted that my quality would improve and they’d rediscover me again. It happened: I just wrote my first viral piece ever according to stats.
I wish you the same! Keep on writing, keep on learning, and continue to observe the behaviour of this amazing platform with an open mind. Here’s my own slogan:
Medium: Learn every day about everything.
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Lucien is writer, blogger and author of “The Wisdom Keeper”, a heroes journey about the need to fall in love with earth again and be humbled by the wisdom of our earth keepers.