MEDIUM NEWS
I Found Out Why Earnings Have Dropped
Straight from the Medium’s Director of Publication Relations
This is no joke or satire. It’s currently late in my country, and I’m dead tired, so pardon my messy writing. I just wanted to share the breaking news with you guys as soon as I found out.
Ariel Meadow Stallings posted a comment on one of my articles in which I expressed my stupid assumptions about this subject. She was kind enough to explain to me that the whole thing was not done intentionally by Medium, and it’s not part of any new monetization change.
An official announcement will most likely be issued later, but until then, here is what she wrote:
Heya! I’m Medium’s Director of Publication Relations, and just wanted to report in here:
We recently discovered organized fraudulent activity impacting payments for September/October Partner Program writers.
We found fraudulent activity from accounts targeting our program to specifically divert funds. If you’re a Partner Program writer, you may have seen a decrease in earnings from on or around September 25th. Our team has removed these users and we’re taking action to mitigate the impact to Partner Program writers.
To be clear: This is fraudulent activity at scale and it’s 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. We’ll share more information as we work to resolve this issue.
If I understand this right, it seems that Medium was hacked with bots and AI or something. It sounds crude, but I’m not that tech-savvy. That’s why I included her exact message.
Anyway, this sheds so much light on everything. Now it all makes sense. Medium was focused on getting to the bottom of this as soon as possible to mitigate all the damage the platform got. So they couldn’t say anything until they properly investigated and dealt with the problem.
The bottom line is that genuine users increasing their activity during the excitement they felt in August was not what sacked our earnings.
For so many days, me and my friends have been down because we thought that reading a few articles, having conversations in the comment section, and participating in writing challenges could have contributed to this change. We feared we were regarded as manufactured engagement farmers just because we genuinely read and engaged with the small group in our publication.
It turns out that’s not the case, and our little, fun games are not at fault for sacking the platforms. We were just paranoid and dejected by everything that happened.
So cheer up, my friends. Better days will surely come. Yay!
Tagging some of our writers and friends.
Britt H., Bonnie L. Boucek, Susan Christiana, Dixie Dodd, NancyO, Lisa Guard, William Michael Williamson, John Hansen, Dave Gottlieb, Karen Schwartz, Katy Lin, Mariana Busarova, Lynn L. Alexander, Paula Shablo, Autistic Widower (“AJ”), Jennifer Dunne, Block Wife, Bruce Coulter, Jimwebster, Jason Edmunds, Julia A. Keirns, TzeLin Sam, Dion Groove , Rinku Patel, Sweet Honeylu, Eiman Fatima, Rampath, Tori Hall Sudduth, Amir Bibi, Imothoughts, Jenny Gargarello, Shanti C K, Willow Reed, Nikita Rayne Johnson, Lita, Sahil Patel, Brenda Arledge, Johnny Poitras, Leonora watkins, Just Sam, Frances A. Chiu, Thomas Sturgeon Jr., Coralie Brébec, Kerin, Sophia Tell- Stories 🤓📢🤓, D. Sahaya, A.M. Goode, Sumaya, A man leading a simple life, Yana Bostongirl.
