Hey, Medium: Want to Save the Platform? Axe the Referral Link and Start Paying External Views

This platform has a problem. I’ve heard some refer to it as literary/platform cannibalism. Others have just pointed out that the writers seem to have a more and more narrow focus. I myself took to this publication last month to declare my opinion that writers are killing Medium.

However you phrase it, it amounts to the same thing: everyone seems to be trying to play an algorithm to get a bigger slice of our existing pie. Which raises the question: why not get more pie?

Growing the platform

I don’t know where decisions come from on this platform, other than somewhere up high. That said, somewhere in Command Center Alpha or wherever the top decisions are made, someone determined the platform needed to expand to continue thriving (or surviving). Hence the referral link and referral program.

This is a great example of a good concept with the proper motivations, but one that fails in execution. Most people who aren’t on (or related to someone who is on) Medium find it through searches and shares. Period. They’re working on something for a sociology class and Google “Why no one cares about racism” and get an article of the same name on Medium. Or they see a link to an article that’s gone viral and click on it.

How many of these people are so blown away by what they read that they immediately whip out their credit card and buy a membership through the referral link, right then and there? Almost none. Maybe 30% will remember the name of the platform. 5% might even remember the author. Anything beyond that is wishful thinking and luck.

Instead, they find their way back to this site under similar circumstances and read their second article. Or their third. Etc. Now they might actually remember the platform is called Medium, and have some interest in a membership. Push may come to shove when they hit the hard paywall, but even then they’re not guaranteed to use the referral link.

They may just come back later or Google “Medium membership” 5 days afterward. Even if someone does eventually benefit, it does nothing for the articles they read beforehand that established the goodwill with the reader. So while ostensibly the referral link should incentivize growing the platform, in practice it does nothing. It’s more like a lottery feature than anything else.

Stop the cannibalism

So what does this mean? Well, there’s zero incentive to try and reach an audience that isn’t already on Medium. Some of us still do, of course, but we’re small in number. I have no intentions of making large sums of money on this platform and spend too much time on my real career to do so if I tried. I write for fun and hope that someone will read it — internal or external. Most of my writing does better externally.

Instead, everyone tries to mimic the success others have had while appealing to the existing Medium audience. I see authors talk about top writers on here as if they’re some sort of celebrity rather than a stranger hocking self-help generalizations and empty platitudes on the internet. New authors try to emulate their techniques and chip away at a piece of their audience.

The fact is, this hurts everyone. It hurts the established author because it’s their audience that’s up for poaching. It hurts the new author because they turn away from their skills and passions to emulate others. It hurts the platform because it shrinks our overall appeal and reaches no one new. No random citizen is ever led to Medium by Googling “How to write like Tim Denning.”

On the other end of the spectrum, external views help us all. They expand our audience. There is a lot of great writing on here, plenty of it by authors much more skilled than myself. Their perspective is unique, their style is literary, and their quality is excellent. Unfortunately, the state of our culture is that people won’t naturally go searching for this type of writing. But they may have an appetite for it, assuming they find it.

That’s where our external views come in. People may visit the site for one thing but stay for another. My articles, for example, aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but they do well externally. I hope just a small percentage of them stay browsing the platform after they’ve read my work and go on to find someone else’s. If that’s my entire purpose on this platform, I’m happy with it.

But others may need a push to look outward rather than inward. Medium does excellent in SEO rankings and offers SEO settings for a reason — you can reach a large audience if you play your cards right. But right now there’s no incentive to even ante up, let alone play a hand. I’d venture more than half the authors on here don’t even bother with the settings. Why would you? If you use them successfully, you’ll be rewarded with $0.00.

So let’s reward writers for trying to expand the platform. Hopefully, somewhere up in the command structure, someone at Medium has a finance/accounting background. If so, I know there are projections for what the referral link could potentially cost, and an estimate for new members going forward.

Take those projections and dump them into a pot for external views. Let the grandfathered referrals stand; there’s no reason to take people’s earnings. But going forward? Take the $2.50 for each new member and put it into the external views column. We need fewer people emulating snake oil salesmen and more people reaching an audience if this platform is to survive outside of a few more years.