The Medium Wild Dance: Are You Affected?
Overnight, my views, reads, and earnings went DOWN. Are you also affected?
Medium is an awesome place to be as a writer — as everyone who has been writing here knows.
The Medium Staff also does an amazing job of creating a community that is empathic, warm, receptive, and importantly, accommodating of writers, irrespective of their expertise.
That said, some of the things I wish could be handled differently here are the changes, when they happen, especially those that directly affect writers — changes like moving the stats representation from the bar form to the oscillatory form.
Writers should be given advance notice of such changes (and likely impacts), before implementation.
This way, we’ll be carried along and won’t be in the dark when the changes happen.
If you were paying attention to your stats page before now, this is what it looked like, in all its ‘bar’ glory:

However, in the last twelve hours (at least, for my account), this was changed to the oscillatory model as shown below:

The new oscillatory model is beautiful — and has the added advantage of displaying reads in comparison to views, a feature which, in my estimation, makes it better than what it replaced.
There’s a problem, however:
- This new oscillatory graph does not report things in real-time (which isn’t a deal breaker on its own) and
- It is HUGELY inaccurate (which is a DEAL BREAKER).
To put (2) above in perspective, compared to the views and reads summary I got by mail earlier today (which tallies with the old system), only a third of my views are reported by the new system and only about half of my reads reflect.
I’ve also lost about 1182% of my average daily earnings, by this change!
Writers talk of writing as a calling, a gift that they’d still indulge in, even for free.
However, that our stories are behind a paywall here and we report daily to publish fresh stories and unique insights for our readers means we also appreciate the money that accrues to such efforts.
Tony Stubblebine sorry to bother you, but I’ll appreciate your input while this is so.
I’m only recovering from the November core updates from Google and this appears to be something similar, though I’m sincerely hoping it’s a glitch that will be ironed out, soonest.
In the meantime, has anyone noticed the above with their account views, reads and earnings, or this is just me?
Have an insightful, bite-sized story of 500 words or less? Consider sharing it with the Condensed Community.