Pondering My Choices
Can somebody please explain how we get paid for our stories at Medium?
Yes, I heard it’s a combination of reading for more than 30 seconds, claps and comments, and people in the Friends of Medium category scattered about the audience doing the reading. But it still does not make sense to me.
The picture above is a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my stats. This screenshot is for March 2024. I highlight the days I don’t earn anything in a peach color. Please notice on March 16, I had 44 reads. I earned nothing. I could go on.
Last week, I emailed Medium Support about what I saw as a somewhat puzzling circumstance. I haven’t heard back from them. Perhaps they are overworked. Perhaps I asked something they all thought was hilarious and then shitcanned. They seem to be friendly enough. My awesome powers of psychic deduction are not helping me here.
I’ve needed to speak to the folks in Support at other times. For example, nothing changed with my statistics when I was told folks were following me or signing up to be email subscribers. At that time, Support wrote back to say something was probably wrong with the other people’s settings. They suggested they had checked off the no-email button. I did notice there was an uptick in my subscribers after that which also indicates there might have been something wrong on the Medium side of the fence.
Ever since last August, when the shit hit the fan around here, and Tony took the reins, things have been different. Interestingly, I listened to him yesterday on the Pub Crawl, where he said after the fan turned on in August 2023, Medium’s subscribers shrunk to 680,000. Because of the changes Medium instituted when quality over quantity in writing was adopted, which I agree with, our subscriber base is now edging toward a million people. This is a good thing. For Medium.
Not for me.
I have to mention that although I could listen to about half of Tony’s opening presentation for the Pub Crawl, the Zoom stuff wasn’t working for me. I kept getting knocked out of the meeting, which, I admit, may have been something I wasn’t doing correctly, but signing back in again was truly painful with multiple emails back and forth with Zoom with new verification codes.
I tried to find a recording of what happened with the presentations yesterday and couldn’t locate it. If you know where it is, could you please let me know?
When I lost hope with the Pub Crawl and decided to do other things with my time, I tried to get into the meetings after Tony’s presentation. The very first one was presenters who were as clueless as I was with turning on and off mute buttons. I realize we don’t do this often, but the same thing happened the last time Medium hosted presentations.
I tried signing up for some of the publications inviting new writers on the Pub Crawl and have yet to get anywhere. Perhaps I have learned something after all. After a few minutes, I stopped banging my head on the wall.
Perhaps the universe is once again trying to tell me something. My attention might be better focused on other things, like my books and my website, though I have always maintained that I meet the most interesting people writing at Medium.com.