Medium Sabotage

I Found Yet Another Way Medium is Screwing Us

But I Can Help You Fix It

I’m going to start this blog by stating something I’ve said many, many times: I love being a Medium writer. I put hours and hours into this every single day of my life.

I still have yet to find a platform that is as fun and easy to use as Medium, while paying us as much as we have the potential to earn here on our preferred writing platform. Believe me, I’ve tried a bunch of them.

Vocal, Substack, HubPages, Ko-fi, LinkedIn, and Tealfeed. They all sounded promising initially, and all of them have fallen well short of what I’ve been able to earn and accomplish here on Medium.

That being said, I’m getting pretty fucking irritated with some aspects about Medium.

I wrote a piece recently about how I suspected Medium was throttling our blogs. I often start each month out of the gate with a bang. Then, around the 20th to the last week of the month, it seems I take a sudden dive in views, reads, and earnings.

Check out what I’m talking about here:

Sadly, this isn’t the first thing that tells me Medium is stacking the deck against us in terms of earnings. I noticed way back in the beginning that they often don’t have your articles set to be metered automatically. Even though I put every article I write behind the paywall.

I’ve noticed that when I go to input my 5 tags right before I publish any given writing piece, about one out of four times, it unchecks the box you have to have checked to meter your story and allow it to earn income.

Maybe this has happened to you. Have you ever gotten to this screen and noticed that the top box is suddenly unchecked?

And no shit, 100% honesty: When I went to apply my tags just now and get a screenshot of this pic, of course, it was unchecked. Not cool, Medium.

Fortunately for me, I am an expert at making sure I get paid. The envelope is never light. Don’t mess with an Italian and his money. My people don’t appreciate that. I’m sure you’ve heard this more than a few times on mob movies or on The Sopranos. It’s true.

Think about this for a minute. If Medium does in fact automatically uncheck that metering box on every four or five writing pieces we publish, they are in theory saving themselves 20 to 25 percent on money they have to pay out. I shudder to think how many writers haven’t noticed this and gotten screwed over on income.

I have to assume that most Medium writers HAVE noticed this. I am a details guy who makes a point not to get screwed over in business. I hope you’re the same way, too.

But if you’re not a details person, you’re welcome on this one.

This brings me to the next way Medium is screwing us over. I only discovered this one yesterday. It doesn’t apply to all of us, but it definitely applies to enough of us. Check this shit out.

I am the owner of Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs. I created the publication on July 3rd of last year and we’ve grown quickly. We now have over 2200 followers and 350 writers. I’ve seen us reach over 400,000 read-minutes in a 30-day period recently. Things are going well.

Back in November, I discovered the joy of newsletters. Yep, you could write a newsletter that gets sent out to anyone who is a follower of your publication and has elected to receive newsletters.

I’ve always enjoyed putting together a newsletter. At first, I was trying to do them weekly, featuring my favorite stories we published that week in BBB, and a little about the author. But it got to be a lot.

They take time to put together. I like featuring ten writing pieces and by the time you apply the pics, the links, and a little write-up about the author, it ends up taking a couple of hours. No sweat, I enjoy doing what I do.

They seemed to take off well, compared to a lot of my writing articles. The views, reads, and claps seemed to accumulate faster than average. I’m always happy to see each newsletter earning me more income than many of my stories.

Or so I thought.

Yesterday, I noticed that the newest edition of our newsletter hadn’t earned any income. WTF? I quickly checked to see if it was metered. You can tell by that little yellow star next to your articles if something has been metered or not. My latest edition of the BBB newsletter was not. I did more research.

None of them were. Not a single one.

I quickly played around with the options and found that I could turn it on after publishing it. I will do this from here on, without fail. Count on it.

But those were five or six envelopes that weren’t just light. They were empty.

Man, was I pissed. Once again, Medium seemingly was pulling another shady, bullshit maneuver behind our backs. I shouldn’t have to discover these things on my own by being suspicious and double-checking what SHOULD be a default setting to help us as writers rather than hinder us.

So if you own a publication and you’ve been putting out newsletters, you likely have been missing out on earnings. Here’s how to fix this:

In the pic above, there is no metering option box to check when you first publish your newsletter. You have to change the setting after you apply your tags and publish it. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix.

Go to your newsletter in your Stories section and click on it. When it opens, choose the edit option from the 3 dot menu:

Once your newsletter is open for editing, click the 3 dot menu again and choose, “Manage meter setting”. It will look like this:

Once you open that option, the next thing you’ll see looks like this:

Yep, once you click on that option, you’ll notice that Medium conveniently has that metering box unchecked. That’s their bullshit default setting. Fix it by clicking the box so it’s checked, and you’ll now be earning money for your newsletter.

It’s a sad state of affairs that these three things I’ve mentioned seem to happen far too often. A writing platform as great as Medium shouldn’t be set up to screw hard-working, talented writers out of the relatively small paychecks they’re earning. Yet here we are.

We pour our hearts and souls into our writing. I assume with the user-base Medium has, they are quite profitable. Let’s see some of that profit go back to where it belongs: The talent. &:^)