Medium’s New Algorithm Is Amazing
…at making me seriously consider other platforms
I joined Facebook three weeks after it exited university-only mode.
The first message I ever received was from my now-wife of thirteen years:
What is a “poke?” I don’t get it.
The following year, Michelle and I started a charity to fight human trafficking and began to build a pretty serious following on Facebook.
We invested thousands of dollars and grew our audience to nearly 20,000 followers, which was a big deal fifteen years ago.
Everything we posted on Facebook received thousands of likes and hundreds of shares.
Until one day it didn’t.
Facebook changed its algorithm, and suddenly, posts received 1/10th as many likes and just a few dozen shares.
Then Facebook started asking us, “Would you like to boost this post?”
We scratched our heads. Why would we pay money to reach an audience that we already paid to reach?
It was the first time we experienced the social media bait-and-switch.
I thought Medium would be different.
If the product is free, then the user is the product. But since subscribers pay $50/year to binge Medium articles, surely this platform wouldn’t pull a bait-and-switch like the rest.
Writers could trust Medium to honor the deal: If writers invested time and creativity into writing for the platform, their follower count would grow, reading time would grow, and income would grow.
Less than a month ago, I cracked 10,000 Medium subscribers.
By the end of the month, I’ll break 11,000.
But it’s literally irrelevant now, with zero correlation to reading time.
Here’s my view count since last month’s stupid algorithm change:
Reads, read time, and income are the same…
All way down.
Why?
Because Medium no longer values writers.
Despite the fact that writers create 100% of the value that makes people pay for Medium, they’d rather give that money to non-contributing affiliate marketers instead.
They’ve utterly lost the plot.
The ideal version of Medium
Medium needs to seriously ask itself why readers pay $50/year.
Is it because readers want to enrich affiliate marketers?
Heck no.
People pay $50/year to read an unlimited number of articles by the writers they’ve chosen to follow.
As a reader
I want to see 100% of the articles written by Tim Denning, Jessica Wildfire, J.J. Pryor, and the other thirty writers I follow. I might not read every single article, but I want to see every single title in my Medium feed and my inbox. And I don’t want to see anything else by anyone else until I’ve seen everything my chosen writers have written. (I’d ideally love a “pass” button to hide any article that doesn’t interest me, making my homepage a to-read feed.)
As a writer
I want my 11,000 followers to be presented with the opportunity to read 100% of the articles I publish. They’ve chosen to follow me, after all. Currently, Medium shows my articles to about 10% of my audience over the course of a week or so, even though all 11,000 want to hear from me. Aren’t they paying Medium to keep them up to date with my work? This goes for every writer and every subscriber. Concoda has 26,000 fans… meaning 26,000 readers should see 100% of his articles in their Medium feed and inbox.
This model might mean we’ll have to follow fewer people, but it means we’ll build far deeper reader-writer relationships.
(And if there was a pass button, it would be helpful for writers to know what percentage of their subscribers passed on which articles.)
As a fan worried about Medium’s future
I’ll say it straight-up: Ev and team — get rid of the affiliate program and divert all that money back to your actual value-creators.
Medium’s strength was paying writers wild sums of money for publishing articles that were broadly and/or deeply popular.
Keep on your current path and your most valuable contributors will leave you.
But if you reverse your bait-and-switch, the score will take care of itself.
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