If You Were Enjoying Medium’s Shortform Articles — Too Bad

It ended almost as soon as it began

Okay, shortform hasn’t exactly ended. But if you want to write a shortform story that fully displays on your profile or publication homepage, you can’t put it behind the paywall.

What is shortform?

Recently Medium introduced a new feature where articles of 150 words or less could be read in their entirety without clicking on the “read more” button.

The change was made when Medium updated profiles and publication homepages to a single stream of stories. The idea was to let readers get a preview of the articles. If the article was 150 words or less, the entire story could be read on the homepage, no extra clicking required.

As usual, there was a lot of discussion among Medium writers as to whether this idea was brilliant or misguided. Nobody wanted Medium to turn into Twitter. We already have Twitter, thank you very much, and nobody is looking for another one.

Proponents of the shortform believe that it can be a useful format for writing a compelling, but brief, article with a link to a related, but old, piece, that you’d like to breathe new life into.

Not much of a moneymaker, it became a helpful marketing tool to garner new interest and followers. On the other side of it, creative types flourished with the shortform with their poems and insightful, yet concise stories.

Medium writers got busy with the new format

Publications popped up to utilize this new format. I started writing for Short Shots City, where every writer is made an editor and we’re all responsible for publishing our own content.

I embraced the shortform. In under 10 minutes, I could write a 150-word story, link to one or more of my older articles, and it was done. I liked pinning them to my homepage to give readers a brief read, without the need to click away.

And then it was gone

And then, one fine day, the shortform was no more. There was seemingly no explanation. I went on the Short Shots City Publication and noticed that my shortform article was only showing about 30 words without the need to click. Not the 150.

If only I had read Medium’s 3 Min Read on December 16th, I would have been enlightened. I didn’t find this story until today though.

To sum it all up, Medium decided that the shortform didn’t work as well as they had hoped. They said it “worked well” as a preview for long-form stories. They liked it for unmetered (not behind the paywall) stories. But they seemed to struggle with determining payments for shortform stories that weren’t being clicked on.

As they said, “shorter stories that were metered saw a decline in their earnings.”

So…they solved the problem of not making much money from shortform articles by not letting you make any money from shortform articles? Well, that’s one way to solve the problem I suppose.

Goodbye paywall

I’d never written stories 150 words or less before, so I am unable to compare the new method with the old. But I can tell you, my shortform stories have earned around 9 cents each.

Such a whopping amount. If I wrote one short story per week for a year, I’d have a grande vanilla latte from Starbucks. Which honestly, as a freelance writer, is nothing to scoff at.

If a story is under 150 words and metered, it will be truncated in a way that encourages readers to click through to its story page. It is important to note that unmetered shortform will not be affected by this update. — Ritwik Dey, 3 Min Read

So now my options remain:

• Continue to put my shortform stories behind the paywall. Make my 9 cents, but irritate the heck out of readers that click “read more,” only to find they had to go to an extra step to read a few more words.
• Keep writing shortform stories for free. Use them for creative means and bringing in more traffic. Don’t meter them and kiss my end-of-the-year latte goodbye.

Final thoughts

It’s not so much the change about the payment that irritates me, (it’s only pennies after all), but the lack of communication. Here we all were, on board with the shortform, happily uploading our 150-word stories, without even realizing nobody was seeing them.

Unless we all received emails about this and I promptly deleted mine. Yes, that’s possible and I apologize now to the Medium gods if that’s the case.

My decision on the shortform is that I’m giving up my future latte. If I want to write a shortform article, I’m not going to put it behind the paywall. It seems silly to make people click for a one minute story so that I can get paid a few pennies. I’ll use the shortform when I want to throw a quick thought out there, much like Twitter. Or as another tool for getting my articles some new reads.

And my takeaway from all of this? I’m going to start reading Medium’s 3 Min Read publication a bit more often.