Summary

The article analyzes whether Medium has reduced payments to writers, concluding that there is no evidence of a decrease and suggesting that the referral program bonuses are additional income.

Abstract

The author investigates claims by Medium writers that their payments have decreased, despite an increase in article views. By examining the relationship between subscriber reading time and earnings, the author calculates a "payment rate" to assess changes over time. Contrary to expectations, the data reveals a slight increase in the payment rate since last year, from 4.7¢/min to 5.1¢/min. Even after accounting for potential anomalies in the data, the payout rate remains constant at 4.75¢/min. The article also addresses the introduction of Medium's Referred Member program, which compensates writers for signing up new subscribers. The analysis suggests that these payments are not diverting funds from article payouts, indicating that the referral bonuses are indeed supplemental income.

Opinions

The author initially suspects that Medium may have reduced article payments to fund the new Referred Member program.
After analyzing personal earnings data, the author concludes that there is no evidence of reduced payments for articles.
The author believes that Medium's compensation system, which pays based on subscriber reading time, is fair and helps prevent gaming of the system.
The author suggests that the variation in payment rates for articles published around the same time indicates that there may be undisclosed factors influencing payouts.
The author is skeptical about the accuracy of the data for two particular articles that show unusually high payout rates, suspecting an error in the reporting.
The author's final opinion is that the referral program bonuses are truly additional income and not a redistribution of the existing payment pool for content creators.

Has Medium Reduced Writer Payments?

An Analysis of Medium’s Payment Rate Shows…

Medium Writer Payment Rate (cents/member reading minute) Over Time. Illustration by Author.

Many writers on Medium have claimed payments for articles have decreased recently. (A couple of examples here and here.) I set out to find out if that is true or not.

With the new Referred Member program, writers get paid for signing up new subscribers. Many people have claimed that these payments aren’t additional money but a redistribution of the payment pie.

In other words, is the 50% of the subscription fees Medium is paying us for signing up new subscribers coming out of the money that Medium was using to pay for articles?

Without inside information, it’s impossible to tell for sure. However, analyzing our earnings can give us a strong indication.

The first thing to look is how Medium sets its payments.

As writers, we usually monitor the headline number — article views. But Medium has hinted strongly that views is not the metric they used to set payment.

Instead, it appears to be a based on the total amount of time Medium members spend reading the article. In other words, all our friends jumping in from Twitter don’t count. That would be easy to game. So only Medium’s paying subscribers’ reading time counts. That seems fair.

An article that a subscriber spends 10 minutes reading is worth 10x more than a 1 minute article (or a 10-minute article that people stop reading after 1 minute). Also fair. And prevents gaming by dividing up a long article into many short ones.

If we look at detailed statistics for any article, Medium tells us the subscriber reading time and earnings, either month-by-month or total.

That allows us to calculate a “payment rate” of cents per minute of member reading time.

I analyzed the earnings from own articles to see if the payment rate has changed since last year.

The completely correct way to do this analysis is to look at each article’s payment rate every month. But that’s too much work for the $2 I’ll make from writing this article. So I took a shortcut.

Instead of analyzing each article’s payments separately each month, I used the lifetime earnings and reading time. Pretty much all of my articles follow a pattern where 90% or more of the views are in the first 2 weeks and very little after that. That makes the lifetime earnings a reasonable, though not perfect proxy for the payment rate at the time each article was published, even if it did bring in a little more in subsequent months.

I was expecting to find the payment rate to be a fixed amount. Surprisingly, the payment rate varied from 3.1¢/min to 9.9¢/min. Aha! Medium is cutting our payments, right?

But no, one of the highest and lowest values were in exactly the same month. In fact, they were for articles posted 1 week apart. And those articles had nearly identical views, reads, internal/external rates. So there must be some additional factors determining payouts, though it’s not clear what that is.

The graph at the top shows the payment rate from my first articles in Sept. 2020 until Nov. 2021. The dashed line is a trend line using linear regression.

The data shows not a decrease in the payment rate but a slight increase since last year from 4.7¢/min to 5.1¢/min.

There are 2 articles that have payout rates much higher than any others. Looking at the daily earnings for those articles, there were many days with no views at all where it made substantial earnings, so I suspect somethings is wrong with that data. Removing those 2 articles, we get this graph:

Adjusted Payment Rate over Time. Illustration by Author.

With those 2 articles removed, the payout rate is constant for the entire period at 4.75¢/min.

If we separate the articles published before and after the announcement of the referral program in August, the average rate was 4.8/min before and 4.7¢/min afterwards. Essentially, no change as far as my data shows.

At least from my own data, it looks unlikely that Medium has reduced the payout for content to pay for the referral program. In other words, the money we make from the referral program is truly a bonus on top of our regular content payment.