Don’t Discard The Medium Referral Program

It is really worthwhile

At the announcement of the Medium Referral Program, I had mixed thoughts. It is a great idea and another incentive for writers to make more money on the platform, but it somehow also felt like selling a piece of my soul to ask people to join Medium using my referral link (I never wished to be more wrong).

First things first, if you are not sure how the referral program works, it is nothing but you bringing in new Medium Partner Program(MPP) members to the platform based on your writing. It is clear that you can only read three stories a month if you are not an MPP that is behind the paywall, but the MPP allows you to read as many stories as you want with an additional option to earn money by writing stories yourself and putting them behind the paywall.

This is the reason I became an MPP member because I finished my quota of three stories, usually within the 1st couple of days of the month.

You can either join MPP with a monthly ($5) or yearly ($50) subscription fee. The way Medium pays writers is by determining (a secret magic trick) the amount of MPP members who read your stories.

While Medium shares your stories within its sandbox environment but you can also reach people outside Medium with SEO. When people search for keywords on a search engine, and your story pops up in the result, they will click and read. This is one of the ways the external views in Medium are counted.

In most cases, the people coming from search engines are not MPP members. If they like what you have to say, they might want to read more of what you and other writers have to say on the platform. This is an incentive for those readers to join the MPP.

Now, if these non-MPP members join MPP using your link (where they don’t incur any additional cost), you get 50% of their subscription fee.

At the moment, I have 4 people who have joined using my referral link. It equates to $9.08 a month — which covers my monthly membership fee by almost twofold.

But what if it gets multiplied by 10? That is $90.8 a month. Imagine it being multiplied by 100 — that’s $908 a month. How about 1,000? It is a whopping $9080 a month of passive income without writing a single word.

Of course, these numbers stay true until the paying member has an active membership. The moment they cancel, you lose their share.

To be very honest, bringing in these many new members when there are a plethora of writers on the platform trying the same is hard, but it is not impossible. And that possibility is another motivating reason for me to continue on this platform.

There are a lot of people who are not liking the changes the platform is making, and they are entitled to their opinion. I respect that. But complaining isn’t going to solve anything.

At the end of the day, Medium is a business, and it is here to make money.

Writers need to adapt and adjust to changes the platform brings, not the other way around.

Thank you for reading.

If you enjoy reading stories like these and want to support me as a writer, consider signing up to become a Medium member. It’s $5 a month, giving you unlimited access to stories on Medium. If you sign up using my link, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

You can find all my stories here in this index: