Did Medium Just Make a Big Mistake? The New “Friend of Medium” Tier

Medium writers, pay attention to this new subscription tier. It matters.

Yesterday, I received the above notification when I logged into Medium. Friend of Medium? I couldn’t remember anything about this program so I went to the link provided to read more.

The Medium team just unveiled it yesterday. It’s being offered to Medium members in a delayed roll out. I was in the lucky group of members who received the ability to join on day one.

In a nutshell, it’s a new membership tier targeted to Medium readers who want to better support Medium (Yes, there are actually people like that. We Medium writers should be grateful!). It does cost 3x more ($150 annually or $15 per month), but it allows more dollars to be distributed to the writers these Friends of Medium actually read and at a higher rate (4x).

Sounds great, right?

Readers are able to support the Medium writers they love by paying more into Medium. They don’t have to buy a kofi for each of their beloved Medium writers…they just pay more into the system and distribute more money to the writers they focus on and at an elevated rate.

There’s a second component that readers are super excited about. And it’s this part that concerns me. Readers of this membership tier can also share friend links to any paywalled story they want. And Medium intends to compensate authors for that read time from non-members.

Friends of Medium will be able to create and share Friend Links for any paywalled story. When non-members follow these links and bypass the paywall, their read time is factored into the writer’s earnings.

Again, sounds great, right? What is there to be worried about? Medium is now compensating authors for non-member reads. Yay! In the comments of the announcement of this new program it was clear this was a winning feature. A handful of readers signed up (or intend to sign up when they receive their invite) just for this new benefit.

However, there’s a big catch here. And after the lessons Medium learned a couple of months ago from people gaming the previous payout algorithm, I’m surprised they didn’t address this when they announced this new tier yesterday.

Friend of Medium readers can cheat the system in this new model. Think about it. They could share out their new special friend link to social media, a mass of “friends”, etc. and orchestrate a horde of people reading the story just to increase earnings. There would be no way for Medium to track this easily. Sure, it will cost cheaters 3x as much for that level of membership, but it might get paid back in dividends. Since we don’t know how the payout model works, we don’t really know.

Conspiracy theory much? Yeah, except for what just happened. Medium recently cracked down on a group of accounts. They caught people gaming the system back in September and had to adjust writer earnings for October based on this fraudulent activity. From the email we Medium writers received:

Medium Partner Program participants,

We recently discovered organized fraudulent activity impacting payments for some Partner Program writers, and want to inform you about it and let you know what we are doing to protect authors from being affected.

You may have seen a decrease in earnings starting around September 25th through the first few days of October. During this time, we discovered significant fraudulent activity from a small number of accounts targeting our program to specifically divert funds. Our team has suspended these users.

To be clear: This was fraudulent activity at scale, specifically prohibited on our platform. Medium’s rules disallow systematized bulk engagement for the purpose of generating revenue, as well as registering accounts, posting content, or interacting with users or content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.

As Medium continues to expand to more countries, the risk of fradulent activity also increases. More readers = more brains = more problems.

I’m not the only writer with concerns about this new tier. Naturally, when anything changes at Medium writers become skeptical. Here are screenshots from comments that Medium has yet to address + some that they already did address:

No matter how Medium changes their payout system, there are always cheaters who find a loophole and exploit it. We can only hope they get caught and the system gets mended. I would like to see Medium address how they intend to prevent this.

Will I be upgrading to this new membership tier? I would love to because I also want to pay more into the system for Medium writers…but I can’t afford it right now. When my annual membership renews next year, I’ll reconsider it then.

Will you be upgrading your membership? What do you think about the new Friend of Medium subscription tier?

Read more about this new tier here: