Dear Medium, Can You Please Show Earnings in Stats?

A simple fix for the quality problem here.

Dear Medium,

I know you don’t like when we write about you. It’s right there in the curation guide. Posts about Medium are not eligible for curation.

I’m not writing about you, I’m writing to you. And I’m willing to take the curation hit because I have an idea you might like. At least I hope you do.

First? We have a quality problem here...

I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a lot of bad writing here. Incoherent ramblings. Half baked thoughts. Post that don’t end anywhere, but just trail off into wow, that’s 5 minutes I’ll never get back.

We all know it. It’s no secret. It’s not just the elephant in the room. The elephant has gotten so big, it’s sucking the air out of the room.

You know who controls quality right now? Publication editors.

Thing is, they’re not editors in the way the publishing world defines that word. They’re mostly normal people who stepped up to volunteer their time and energy to help a publication grow. From the goodness of their heart.

Judging writers, rejecting writers — those are not easy things to do. And the blunt honest truth is the only criteria they can use is personal taste.

If a publication has 50 or 100 editors, it’s a crap-shoot for writers. Roll the dice. Maybe the editor you get likes your piece. Maybe they don’t.

Let’s be honest. Quality is why you have your own publications.

We all know that. Facebook groups are full of writers lamenting how hard it is to get accepted by in-house publications. Many don’t even try.

And you have to have your own publications, because it’s the only way you can ensure there are spaces filled with top-notch writing. I get that.

Know why there’s so much bad writing?

Part of the reason we have so much bad writing here is that writers have no real barometer with which to measure our own performance.

True growth doesn’t come from measuring ourselves against others. It comes from measuring our own progress.

Views and reads are not a reliable way to assess our own work. Let me give you a real-life example.

— I have one post that got 39K views, and paid me 82 cents. — Another post only got 3.9K views, but paid $125.46

Guess which was better quality? The second one. Obviously. But if I gauged by views and reads, I might think the first one was better quality. Nope.

The first one had a better title, but honestly? It was crap writing.

Money always tells the story, doesn’t it? We get paid based on reads. So the pieces people actually read and digest end up paying better.

Have you looked at the partner dashboard? It’s lovely to see the dollars adding up, but gives no indication of quality. There’s no baseline. It’s like nothing before this month matters.

Heck, if I was to judge quality by the dashboard, I’d think my best paying piece of all time was crap. Because it’s not in the top 5 this month.

We need a longitudinal baseline so we can see our results over time. That’s the only way we can grow as writers.

You might think it would be discouraging…

You might think if writers saw how little each piece earned, we’d quit. I have pieces that earned pennies. Every writer does. Easy to think we’d quit if we saw those abysmal numbers.

I don’t think that would happen.

We wrote for free before the partner program. Remember?

Your top writers? Most of them wrote somewhere free when they were getting started, too. On a blog, or some other writing site. Some writers here wrote at Open Salon before it died. I recognize some of them. I wrote there, too.

As Kafka said, a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

Writers write because we must. We can’t “not” write. You wouldn’t lose us. You’d just give us the tools to improve based on our own work.

Why do you think there’s such a glut of “how to succeed on Medium” posts here. Because people have no idea how to grow, how to improve, or how to tell what’s working and what’s not.

All that have is this month’s pay on the partner page. It’s not enough.

Can you please show our earnings in our stats?

You already have the info in your database. I know that because it’s in the “details” when we click into those from the stats page.

Real simple. Like this…

Heck, you could even add total reading time if you want to. But you don’t have to. The earnings per story would paint the picture we writers need to see.

Know what would happen if the earnings per story were in stats?

1. We’d be able to sort by earnings, just like we can sort every other column.
2. We’d know at a glance which pieces resonated, and actually got read.
3. We’d strive to create more of those wins.

You want more good quality writing? Show people what they earned. Right by the title. Because writers aren’t stupid. Some are unskilled, yes. But unskilled and stupid aren’t the same.

And when writers can look at hard numbers, they will figure it out. Up their game. Strive to do more of the quality writing that retained readers.

Isn’t that kind of the point?

And one other thing…

I’ve noticed a lot of grumbling on Facebook lately. People saying they could earn more flipping burgers. Most of the people saying that probably could.

That’s not meant as an insult.

As Medium grows, it does get harder to rise to that elusive 5.7% that make over $100. But part of that is simply that we lack the tools to measure our own progress over time.

Seeing how each story performs on a longitudinal basis would help. You could give us that. I hope you’ll think about it.

Thanks for reading.

Here’s the other letter I wrote you, in case you missed it…