Listen Up! Did You Get The Engagement Bonus For Listening Time?

Does Listening Time get paid for on top of Member Reading Time?

Did you get the “One-time Engagement Bonus“ for Listening Time?

Recently Medium introduced Audio players for stories behind the paywall. This means that a non-paying member cannot listen to pay-walled stories which earn for reads under the Medium Partner Program (apart from 3 free stories per month).

There is a lot of division over the usefulness and option of the embedded audio players. Some people want the option to record in their own voices and some want the use of an audio player to be at the discretion of the writer.

For now, the feature is still in the trial stage. Medium’s “3 Min Read” blog states that Medium is still determining whether it will be permanent.

My question about how the audio function affects our earnings is vaguely answered in the “3 Min Read” post, duplicated below.

How will this feature affect my earnings? We’ll factor listen time into the payout calculations for eligible writers with metered stories. Eligible writers whose posts have been listened to by Medium members will see a positive adjustment in their earnings after the end of the month. The adjustment will appear as a one-time engagement bonus in the creator dashboard.

I have responded to Medium’s answer with the following questions.

Alex Benzer

Can you clarify this, please?

(1) Will listening time be converted to Member Reading Time with usual current earnings calculations?

(2) Will the “one-time engagement bonus” be additional to per-story Earnings — i.e. additional to earnings paid upon Member Reading Time? (I understand that the listening time will be aggregated over the listening times per month. That is, Member Listening Time, for calculating the Bonus is based upon TOTAL listening time of all the writer’s stories that month by all the paying members who listen).

OR will the Member Listening Time earnings REPLACE Member Reading Time? (If so, then the MLT “bonus amount” per story listened to, before being added up or aggregated, should be equal to the earnings per story calculated under the MRT scheme).

(3) Is there a minimum Member Listening Time to receive a one-time engagement bonus per month?

While waiting for Alex to reply, let’s take apart Medium’s FAQ answer!

We’ll factor listen time into the payout calculations for eligible writers with metered stories.

Can we assume that this means that “listen time” is in addition to “Member Reading Time? “

Eligible writers whose posts have been listened to by Medium members will see a positive adjustment in their earnings after the end of the month.

Can we assume that this means extra earnings on top of earnings calculated under the Member Reading Time?

If yes, then if a person only listens to a story and never reads the words, how is the MRT calculated?

For example, will the speaking time by the automated voice count as MRT?

If this is how MRT is calculated per month, then how is the “positive adjustment-one time engagement bonus” calculated?

The adjustment will appear as a one-time engagement bonus in the creator dashboard.

Can we assume that this bonus will be granted every month (at least while the audio player feature is enabled)?

I assume it is called “a one-time” engagement bonus” because it is a cumulative bonus for the total listening time of ALL stories that paying members have read during a month, of a paid writer’s stories.

The phrase “one-time” means, to me, once or one time (a month) for all of your listened-to stories for a month.

Medium’s FAQs in their article (linked below) states that writers don’t have access, at the moment, to stats on listening times for individual stories.

Will the Stats page for an individual story still show “Member Reading Time” if someone listens to a story, rather than sits in front of the screen reading it?

You can read Medium’s official write-up about the audio players and the FAQs at the link below.

Kristina God explains nicely that writers, who got a “one-time engagement bonus” for listens of their stories in February, should have received an email from Medium to say so!

In February 2022, Medium was trying out the use of audio players by making them accessible to just samples of people.

So in February, there were fewer people than there are now, who could listen to our stories, if they wanted to.

Looking at one of my latest stories, “Full Moon in Virgo: Detach From Drama” published 2 days ago, the cumulative MRT is 10 minutes and I got 5 cents for those ten minutes of Member Reading Time.

So if you got $2 or more for a “one-time listening engagement bonus” for all listens of your stories in February, I think that is great. 😄

To answer my own question: No, I did not get a bonus for listening time for February.

But I have written many stories on Medium which I think sound great spoken out using the Audio player.

Thanks for reading this! I will update this article with Medium’s answers to my questions. 😃 And hopefully people will listen to my articles, so that I receive a “bonus” for listening time. If I do I will report about that here too.

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