Writing — Medium

Is This The End of My Time on Medium?

These Changes Impact All Writers

More changes.

Medium, come on. I’m getting tired of adapting to your new strategies.

The new profile pages are rolling out one by one and I finally got one. Here’s the bad news.

If you write poetry or micro-fiction, you’ve just lost a portion of your earnings here. Profile pages now display your entire poem.

If you write longer articles, this impacts you too.

It’s great for readers. They don’t have to be a paying member of the Medium Partner Program to get access to most of what you write. All a reader has to do is find your profile page.

I’m wondering — Medium, what part of Partner don’t you understand?

There’s a downside for writers who post longer content as well.

Readers aren’t required to go to your story to read the first section. They may scan your profile page and only click on stories that interest them. They are now able to decide, based on your first few paragraphs.

In the past, the reader would have to open your story before beginning to read.

If you tend to capture a reader’s interest right away, good for you. Sometimes a reader warms up to a story as they read. You used to be able to use links and formatting to keep their interest.

Often a writer has a lot to say and the introduction isn’t enough. The reader discovers nuggets of information as they go further in and that’s how you kept their interest. That’s unlikely now.

At the very least, a reader that spends a short period of time in your story is better than a reader that doesn’t click through at all.

It’s been suggested that unpaid MPP members should be presented with a banner on the profile page to block their access after a certain number of stories. A banner isn’t enough.

If paid MPP members read your poetry from your profile page, there’s no credit for their read time.

This isn’t a paid vs. unpaid MPP problem.

This is Medium reducing overall read times.

That’s a cut in your payments.

As America Zed eloquently puts it, ‘How about that for an efficient way to de-value and discourage writers, especially new ones, and ensure they lose all hope of ever earning anything on this site.’

Why would anyone pay when they can read so much for free?

Here are some comments I’ve read as writers consider their options:

Medium has always been hostile to poets, from the text edit, to all the different ways they have tweaked stats, that said the poetry community thrives. Someday they will figure out how to kill it off and then it will be filled with listicles and how to make money on medium articles, that will be compelling.

This is medium's obvious attempt to get poets to produce some epic long-form verses. Be careful what you wish for...

Microfiction — 50 word and 100 word, for instance — is suffering the same issue on profile pages, unfortunately.

I agree with your thoughts about this issue wholeheartedly. Poets should be compensated if we’re paying members and sharing our work. Hopefully, they’ll make changes for the better, sooner than later, in favor of all writers.

As I see it this seems to be rather counter-productive for both Medium and its contributors.

Here’s a writer that shares my inclination to find a workaround:

Unless we start all of our poems with 3 paragraphs of banter and several pictures nobody is going to bother actually reading my writing when it all appears on my home screen so do those views also get negated?

I’ve been playing around with my poetry, to find the perfect balance between content that is essentially padding, moving the poetry to the bottom of my article.

Here’s one solution that didn’t work. Even though I added a ton of content at the beginning of the article, all of it displays on my profile page.

I decided to try posting a new poem. I did not tag it Poetry or use Poetry in the kicker.

This one doesn’t show up on my profile at all. A new glitch.

Medium, please, stop tinkering and let us get back to writing.

Update: here’s Medium’s response to my first question.

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