Medium Curation Changes-The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Medium Curation and Medium Distribution — THE GOOD
“Distribution” means distributing or sharing a story among a network. It is about displaying or sharing a Medium story for potential readers to find and read. This article explores recent Medium curation changes.
Stories are currently distributed by Medium through:
- Curation, which means your story is shown on one or more Topic pages.
2. Being shown on a follower’s personalised Medium homepage, whether on a desktop PC or a mobile phone or mobile device
3. Appearing in the “Latest from following” lists under People or Publications
4. Being featured in a “Daily Digest” email or other email sent out by Medium
5. Medium’s Twitter page, if your story is in a Medium-run Publication
6. Medium’s Facebook page, if your story is in a Medium-run Publication
7. By being featured on the Creator’s Hub or published in a Medium-run Publication.
8. By being a part of the “Amplify” programme
Searching — SOME GOOD AND SOME NOT SO GOOD
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.
Stories on Medium rank high in SEO.
For example, if you have written a story with a unique and specific title on an issue that many people find, your story may appear in the top results when a search is run on the topic, thanks to Medium’s great SEO.
Readers can use the in-built Medium search function to look for stories to read. However, the default search returns the “top” stories under the search terms, and there’s currently no obvious ability to view the latest published stories.
If a reader searches upon a tag, the top 10 stories only appear (presumably in terms of a combination of number of views and/or reads and/or the latest story viewed).
Once again new or unknown writers’ stories who don’t have top stories won’t be quickly found.
Medium used to have a tab or a page for “Latest stories” under a Tag search, but this was removed sometime in 2019. A work-around to look at latest published stories under a Tag name is to type in /latest after the tag name, as shown in the example below. For tags with stories that don’t have a lot of recent activity (reads/views), only a few of the latest stories may appear.
https://medium.com/tag/writing/latest
UPDATE: April 2021
I am happy and grateful to say that Medium has improved its Search function now! You can read about how searching works here.
What is Curation?
The term “distribution” includes curation, so when a story is curated, it is distributed to readers by being placed on a Topic page on the Medium site.
At the time of writing this, there are 12 categories of Topics (listed below), with the total number of topics being 107. Writers can acquaint themselves easily with these Topics. Click on your Avatar (round picture at the top-right) then on “Customize your interests” then on Topics to get to the Topics page. Alternatively, bookmark the link below.
https://medium.com/me/following/topics
- Arts & Entertainment
- Culture
- Equality
- Health
- Industry
- Personal Development
- Politics
- Programming
- Science
- Self
- Society
- Technology
Medium has human curators (about 25 of them) who read some of the thousands of stories published on Medium each day, who select high quality, high value stories to be curated or placed under a topic on the Topic page.
In January 2019, Shannon Ashley wrote that Medium stated it had more than 25 curators, which I take to mean 26 to 30 curators or not much more. “More than 25” means “at least 25”.
https://readmedium.com/what-ive-learned-from-a-60-curation-rate-on-medium-6b36102ac16e
Shannon Ashley says:
Curation on Medium means that your story has been distributed through one or more topics on the platform. Medium may include your story in a daily digest email, or simply prompt your story to come up more frequently in the app and website to readers interested in those topics.
THE CAMPS — the UGLY
Curation began in February 2019.
Obviously there are not the number of curators needed to read and curate most or even many stories published on Medium per day. Medium has “Curation Guidelines” to assist you with getting a story curated. Medium adds new Topics from time to time.
There is a lot of discussion on Facebook Groups and on Medium itself about how to get curated and many aired grievances about not having stories curated, BUT this discussion is far from the majority discussion on these platforms. It’s just that some don’t like reading all the complaining about curation, and get annoyed with those who feel aggrieved with not being curated.
Basically there are two extreme “camps” or “Juries.”
Camp One
Those who strive for curation and are obsessed with it, and get upset when their story is not curated, and even get angry. These people may not accept or realise that curation is a numbers game, given the obvious that a story that is curated has to have value and be well written.
These unhappy individuals grumble constantly about not having stories curated. While I have complained about there not being more curators, be aware that my grievances about such have been few and far in between. Be aware that I am not un-intelligent and if you’re in Camp Two, please have some empathy for those who really are stuck in Camp One (not many I guess). They are there because curation actually does matter to them.
Camp Two
Those who tell others that curation isn’t at all important and hasn’t personally helped them, and that writers shouldn’t care about curation.
This camp says that writers should focus on writing “high quality stories” on topics that people want to read, and publish in Medium Publications with large followings, and/or should publish a lot, ideally one story a day.
Those in this group are always crying “curation isn’t all that important” based upon their own experiences which may include their stories having a wide following because of the topics and/or the Publications that they are in.
They constantly try to educate those in Camp One, hoping that one day the poor sad wrong-footed occupants in Camp 1 will realise the errors of their ways and admit that curation is not what it’s cracked out to be. The people in this camp could ignore discussions by others, about curation. At least, don’t tell them curation doesn’t matter, just tell them why their stories may not be curated. Have faith that they don’t pin all their hopes on curation.
I am in Camp 1½ — one of those who is realistic and grateful for curation. I understand that curation can bring benefits, however small or large.
I think that some people on Medium think that all those who talk about curation are obsessed by curation, and are unrealistically reliant upon curation for their stories to be read, but that is simply not true.
Sure I would love my stories to be curated and discovered under a Topic, and read, especially for the following reasons:
- There is so much competition for reading on Medium
- I have next to no personal network to promote / share my Medium stories to
- The Medium search function is cumbersome for readers to use
- I can’t publish one story a day
- I don’t have content to write for most of the bigger publications, which have most if not all of their stories curated.
THE BAD — IF YOU’RE IN CAMP ONE
It has been reported that Medium hoped by 2020 that it would have one million paying members.
Nobody knows how many members of Medium actively write on Medium.
If you do a search on “Medium Staff” under “People” on the Medium platform, you will find 49 million people (account holders) have been following “Medium Staff” since June 2019.
When a person registers or signs up with Medium, she/he automatically follows the “Medium Staff.” There will be more than 49M registrants with Medium, because some may un-follow Medium Staff, and of course some signed up with Medium before the “Medium Staff” profile was created!
Just this snapshot above gives an idea of the numbers any writer is up against, regarding having his or her story read. Yes, I know the figure includes duplicate and inactive accounts, but there still must be a heck of a lot of Medium writers and readers.
And now with the October changes, all Medium members’ stories are eligible for curation, not just the stories of members who are in the Medium Partner Program (MPP)
Back when the MPP began in 2017, Medium made a story eligible for curation in exchange for a writer in the MPP locking a story (so both writer & Medium could get money) but now Medium doesn’t need this “bargain”.
So NOW if you’re in the MPP (whether you pay $5 a month or not to read) you can choose whether to “lock your story” or “put it behind the paywall” which means you will receive reimbursement for the story, according to Member Reading Time.
Back when the MPP began, some writers actually didn’t WANT to lock their stories because that meant people who were non-paying members may not be able to read them. Non-paying members can currently read 2 free stories a month on Medium.
Medium encouraged writers to lock their stories by waving the carrot or incentive of “we will look at curating your stories if you do lock them”.
Before October 2020, you had to be in the MPP and lock your story behind the paywall, for your story to be eligible for curation.
In October 2020 Medium removed the carrot in the face of fairness to allow 2 things.
- Those NOT in the MPP can now have their stories eligible for curation.
2. Those in the MPP who don’t lock a story (not likely) can now have that story eligible for curation.
So when a writer publishes a story now, she/he can check the box to make the story eligible for payment (meter the story so it’s eligible to earn money). Whether the box is checked is not, the story will still be eligible for curation.
The recent changes are explained in the article below.
The Unknown — THE GOOD OR THE BAD?
So, if you’re in Camp 1½ or in Camp 1 maybe you won’t mind waiting a little while for Medium’s new and improved “distribution system” to kick into place. This is a system which Medium hasn’t yet fully explained. But some Medium members have written that this is about stories being shown or distributed to a writer’s followers on mobile phone apps.
The jury is still out over whether the stories of writers with small numbers of followers will be shown to their followers. The article below refers to this.
I get that Medium wants writers to become more “relational” or to engage more with others, to get their stories read. I have written to Medium asking if they are going to do away with other information, such as the numbers of followers on the Profile pages, and the showing of a person’s Claps, Responses and Highlights.
In my opinion, removing the Topics labels from curated stories on the stats pages helps nobody. If Medium is to replace this omission with another quick and convenient way of finding the Topic(s) that a story was curated under, why not just keep the Topics labels on the Stats pages?
The answer, it seems is that they don’t want new Medium writers becoming obsessed with curation (which they think could happen if the writers see the Topic labels up front).
It remains to be seen if Medium focuses on desktop users as much as it focuses on those who read Medium stories on mobile phones and devices.
The profile information mentioned above and the current grid and pages/tabs layouts of the privately run Medium Publications, provide a breadth and a depth of information that readers and writers can use to be “relational”, so I hope that these elements are not altogether removed.
Like me, you may have come to the point where you regard Medium as a holding place for your writing. Your content is your intellectual property, so you can re-purpose it.
You can collate your articles into a book or you may be able to post or publish or send some of your stories to other platforms or publishers. But please follow the Guidelines of the Medium publication that your story is in, e.g. some Publications have a rule not to publish your story outside of their Publication until it’s been in their Publication for thirty days.
You could stay with Medium for the long-haul, gathering more followers the longer you actively write on Medium, and perhaps increasing the number of reads of your stories, even if by small increments.
Or you could relax and turn a new leaf. You could realise that things change and can be changed back, and you can clarify your boundaries. Do you have any elements of Medium that you absolutely want, in order to continue your journey with Medium? If not but you’ve got a wish-list, you can contact Medium about it.
Meanwhile you can do your best to distribute your own stories, and if you can’t do much more than what you are already doing, then go with or take what you have got right in front of you. Appreciate what you do have, and treat Medium as a platform which you can use or not. Write for yourself, not for Medium, if you prefer, and build up your content for another day (or for another platform or avenue).
Casey Botticello gives a comprehensive and fascinating history of Medium and its activities. Thank you Medium for teaching me to be present to what is in front of me. Through thinking about the good, the bad and the ugly of distribution changes and other Medium changes, I have now marked my boundaries. I look forward to further developments on Medium so that I can review and make other choices.