Day Two of the New Shadowy Monetization System

Summary

Medium is quietly phasing out its new monetization policy, with recent low earnings for many writers raising concerns about potential switch back to a less rewarding system.

Abstract

According to the content provided, Medium has been observed to be slowly ending its new monetization policy, which had rewarded active users, based on the low earnings seen by many writers in recent days. The earnings received in the last two days are significantly lower than the earnings received before, despite a higher number of reads, which is raising concerns that Medium is going back to a less rewarding monetization system.

Opinions

The author believes that the earnings received in the last two days are less than the earnings received before, and that this trend could be a sign that Medium is going back to a less rewarding monetization system.
The author observes that the new policy is not rewarding for writers and that the change is likely to be driven by the complaints of a few people.
The author suggests that Medium may be deliberately reducing the earnings of writers through this change.
The author notes that reading time is no longer being rewarded, which indicates that the new monetization system is worse than the old one.

The August affair — from scheduled ahead and inaugurated at the beginning of August to quietly killed in the backroom of late September

News flash, in case you didn’t notice: Medium is quietly killing off the new monetization policy they made such a big case of in August.

Testimony to that is the extremely low earnings most people got in the last two days. Those of us who write at least one story every day keep track of our daily earnings and often compare notes to track our progress.

That being said, it does look like Medium is rushing to change their new policy that greatly rewarded active users. Using some people’s complaints about the new August monetization as an excuse to sack it, most likely they will switch back to a less rewarding monetization system.

If what I have observed in the last two days becomes the norm, I dare say our earnings will be even less than what they used to be before. Which is super concerning.

Check out the stats of my latest story:

The day before yesterday, I posted some 2-minute articles, unaware of the behind-the-scenes monetization switch. After I checked the stats and saw they barely passed 1 dollar in generated earnings, my first thought was that they switched back to the old monetization system.

So what I did was write one longer article (6 minutes, minus my tag list) to see how that would fare in comparison with the shorter articles. As you can see above, longer articles and longer reading times don’t fare any better.

The stats say I had 20 member reads yesterday (on the 26th). That’s actually nice, but they only generated 1 dollar and 11 cents. Now, I will say something as someone who obsessively checked the stats from day one of the Partner Program: I was never paid so low for 20 freaking full reads, even before August 2023!

You see, I know my people. I know they actually read and did not bail after a few seconds. So the whole thing is clearly a deliberate deduction of earnings by the Medium staff.

Just based on the fact that not even reading time matters now, I would say that the new Shadowy Monetization System is even worse than the monetization system Medium had before August 2023.

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