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Taking Us For A Ride

Blood pressure rollercoaster of writing for Medium

I was delighted to find out in the last two days that one of my stories has started to surge in views and reads, exactly one week after I originally published it on The Haven. Here is the story below:

The piece is a sharp satire that attempts to highlight the obnoxious level of wealth inequality we all find ourselves living in today.

The piece takes equal aim at Harry, Meghan, King Charles and Prince Andrew, and the media that follows their every move, especially in light of the real story of the 21st century: rampant wealth inequality.

Originally, after one week, the piece did about average for me, which was 100 views and 40 reads, pulling in $1.61.

Then something happened. Was I boosted? Did someone from the royal family discover my piece?

In two days, the piece catapulted to 700 views and 350 reads. And these were not external reads. Here are the stats below:

As you will see above, the views are 96% internal. In fact, the piece is still surging as we speak. At first I waited for the earnings to catch up to the surge of internal Medium reading time, as the earnings have not budged, still showing $1.61. I waited through March 10 and March 11, until the time lag made its way to March 10: Still no increase in earnings.

I checked again on my stats page to see if I could gather anymore information about this mystery.

No clue here. Still says 96% internal reads, so I should definitely be getting paid. Right? I then looked at another graph:

So based on the above, is Medium telling me out of the sudden upsurge of 600 additional internal views and 300 internal reads, only ONE PERSON was a paying member?

Are you for real?

My first response is: can Medium provide evidence of this? This would suggest that the percentage of internal Medium members is only ONE PERCENT of the total of internal Medium users.

So then,

WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT OF GETTING BOOSTED?

I am really at a loss as to how anybody makes any money on Medium. I would love for the CEO or any of the 12 Editors with boosting powers to explain this to me.

As it is, we live in stressful and difficult financial times. I’ve got bills, student debt, mortgage, and groceries to pay for. I tutor part time, work at council part time, and write full time, and struggle to make ends meet.

I get the fact that Medium wants to incentivize its writers to retain membership and make money for its company. But what is the point of boosting if there is nothing in it for the writer?

And who are these 12 secret editors? What are their credentials? How do we know they know talent when they see it? What is their socio-economic background? What are their interests? Their biases? And how do we know they are not rewarding friends and followers, while ignoring better writers without connections?

These are serious and fair questions Medium writers who are paying members have a right to know.

That way the next time I wake up in the morning to find the following gloriously rising statistic graph below, I won’t get my hopes up only to come crashing back down:

Thanks for reading my rant. I’m still rooting for Medium, but I think there can be a major improvement with transparency. There were earlier rumors about a small select handful of writers getting selected for a trial run in getting paid for external views. As you can see from the above, I’m not even getting paid for internal views, let alone external.

Has there been any update on said rumor?

I’d love to think I’m not wasting my time on Medium and I still hold out the hope that all of my hard work will pay off on Medium and I will begin to earn a decent income so I can make a better dent into paying off my bills.

If you are a writer who has been boosted, or has had a mysterious upsurge of internal views and reads, what percentage of them were paying members? Did your earnings go up?

I will tag Ben Ulansey and Toya Qualls-Barnette as both of you have shared you have been boosted. I’d love to hear your story.

Thanks for reading.

© Carlo Zeno 2023

March 15 update: After enquiring with the Medium Help Desk asking if I would be getting paid for all of my internal reads for this story, I was assured I would not be getting paid as they were all indeed non-member internal reads.

The helpful person also further elaborated for me all of the ways something can be considered an internal read, which I will share below:

“An internal view is defined as traffic generated out of Medium.com itself. This includes:

• The Medium homepage feed
• Any “read-next” surfaces on Medium pages
• Medium topic pages
• Medium tag pages
• Medium profile pages
• Medium emails and digests
• Official Medium social media accounts
• Medium newsletters
• Posts shared via our in-product tools to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn
• Posts shared with a shortened “link.medium.com” URL

Please note: If you share a Medium post using our in-product tools to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or with a shortened “link.medium.com” URL, those are considered internal views, and those referrers will NOT show in the referrers list.”

Thank you to Illumination for considering this piece for their publication. If you are new to my writing, check out these two recent pieces below 👇

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