THE SECRETS OF WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 12
Improving How We Calculate Writer Earnings to Increase Your Addiction.
In Medium’s Partner Program, writers earn daily through a new model to reward corporate pocketbooks
Did you read this morning’s bombshell?
Medium is proposing a NEW AND IMPROVED! system to reward “quality writing.”
I’m excited to translate this momentous announcement, line by line:
In 2017, we launched the Medium Partner Program to fairly compensate writers for their quality stories, with unlimited potential to earn. Since then, we’ve paid more than $6 million to over 30,000 writers, increasing payouts year over year.
Quality stories — corporate double-speak for nothing. We laugh at football color commentators who say similar nothing, such as “now, that’s a fullback.” The vast majority of us complain about the crap that clogs our feed, which Medium tells us is “high-quality writing.”
The word quality has been weaponized:
$6 million to over 30,000 writers — To be clear, that translates to $200 per writer over the last 26 months. With that limited pool of money, only 2.3 writers could earn that magical $10,000 per month, with nothing left for the other 29,998 writers.
Your chances of winning the lottery are a little worse than earning $10,000 in a month writing full time on Medium, but buying 5 lottery tickets doesn’t require any work:
Instead of paying based on claps as the main signal, we will now reward stories primarily based on reading time, which we’ve seen to be a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers. To increase transparency and provide richer insight to our writers, we will also introduce new stats so it’s more clear how a story’s earnings were calculated.
Paying based on claps as the main signal — previously an incomprehensible mix they called “reader engagement,” Medium has responded to the hundreds (or thousands) of people who have tried to figure out the compensation system.
Our goals are to understand: 1) if it is fair; 2) if there is any correlation with high-quality writing; and, 3) if writers could adjust their subject matter and writing styles to earn better compensation.
The answer, of course, is nothing about Medium’s system makes sense:
Reward stories primarily based on reading time — Medium will now substitute an even more impossible-to-determine metric to drive writers on this virtual hamster wheel. When people begin to figure out that a video game is almost impossible to win, they lose interest.
The solution is not to build a better game that gives players a clearer understanding of how to play but to make it seem like there is a better new game that everyone should play.
Medium is essentially telling us that they’re adding more nicotine to these digital cigarettes:
By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. For example, if last month a member spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your story, you will receive 10% of their share (a portion of their subscription fee).
We support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers — Good News! All of you people with a small audience will earn 93¢ for your story instead of 92¢!
(a portion of their subscription fee) — Medium finally admits that they are keeping a cut of your $5 monthly subscription fee. We still don’t know how much that is, but it means less total money being distributed to writers.
We believe in reading time because it represents the core value that our readers receive from Medium. It may not be a perfect measure of value, but we find that it’s a powerful proxy.
We believe in reading time because it represents the core value that our readers receive — Sorry poets, comic artists, humorists, and short story writers, your art will receive even less compensation than it already does.
Look for more long-winded self-help articles, millennial opinion pieces, hot and steamy sex confessionals, jargon-laden coding manifestos, and tedious news summaries.
If you thought your feed was crap before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
On the other hand, I tried using the new technology to give readers more of a choice in determining their preferred writing topic:
Here’s the next part of this series on marketing.
Thanks for reading, interacting (while it’s still legal) and sharing!
