The Boost Is Decreasing Your Views — Here’s Why

The Boost gives additional views (500 minimum) to selected stories, but Medium doesn’t create views out of thin air; they come from somewhere.

Before the Boost, Medium was a lottery with two payouts: jackpot or basic.

The LARGE majority (of articles) got the basic payout, and once in a blue moon, a banger article got the jackpot. Most of us never won the jackpot.

It’s the way online content creation generally works. Millions of people create on Medium, YouTube, TikTok, and Whatever else. Most of them make ridiculously low $ per hour and earn a few $ to a few hundred dollars monthly. And you have the stars like MrBeast on Youtube who make millions.

The Boost introduced new payout levels.

Compared with the corporate world, Medium had only a board of directors (the jackpot viral articles) and many employees (the regular stories) before the boost.

Now we have the CEO (articles with 100k views), several directors (50k views), VPs (25k views), managers (10k views), and many middle managers (2k views) before you arrive at the level of the people doing some work, the employees and their regular articles.

The Boost introduced middle management to Medium.

Assuming an unchanged total amount of views from the Medium members (and there’s no reason to think it significantly changed), it means that, we all had a bit more views on average BB. (BB = Before Boost)

We now have fewer views on the average article, but we have higher chances to win the lottery, except that it won’t be a big jackpot but one of the mid-size payouts.

What looks like a problem is, in fact, a gift from Coach Tony. (Thank you, Coach!)

The Boost is a blessing.

Before, you could write whatever you wanted and get decent views. And by decent, I don’t mean you were getting good money, but enough to keep you grinding and willing to publish another article for a chance to win the big jackpot.

Now that the boost is here, part of the “decent amount of views” is redistributed to mid-level payouts, and what remains for the non-boosted stories is disappointing.

Of course, with the boost, we can still win the big jackpot that makes all of us dream. I even saw a story with 100,000+ views! But overall, the middle managers get something average. It’s more than the views we had before, but not viral. I would guess the average boosted story gets a few thousand views.

It all seems in line with the general direction that Coach Tony is giving to Medium. In his interview with Isaiah McCall, he said that he didn’t see Medium as a primary income source but rather as a means to an end. Coach Tony gave the example of a writer using Medium to get clients for their external consulting business. Maybe it’s similar to what he did with Better Humans and his coaching business (I’m not 100% sure).

Tim Denning does this with the mastery courses about Medium, LinkedIn, online content creation, etc.

Coach Tony wants Medium to deliver expert knowledge to its members. From the perspective of a more credible and experience-based Medium, the boost makes sense.

The boost is a good strategy for Medium because it pushes authors to write longer and more-researched articles, which increases the value for readers.

It’s also a good thing for writers because it incentivizes us to raise the quality of our writing. Instead of mindlessly writing 500 words and hitting publish, the potential boost gives us reasons to write 1,400 words, carefully edited and more researched.

By extending the number of payout levels, I think the boost brings more reliability to the earnings (for people writing boostable articles).

Predictions

I predict some of the consequences of the boosting system will be fewer writers, writing fewer and longer articles.

The views we get without boosts are demotivating, so fewer of us will write, and the ones who keep writing will write less because they’ll focus on more researched pieces which will mechanically be longer because of the time and effort invested.

One threat I see

The boost is pushing writers to focus on serious articles.

It means fewer entertaining stories. Medium knows better because they have the numbers, but I suspect entertainment (fiction, humor, etc.) is a big reason why people come to Medium. If readers want to find something researched and insightful, they will go to Substack, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow, to name a few.

Medium is a mix of both serious and entertainment at the moment.

I think it’s one of its strengths, and the shift toward seriousness and less entertainment might be risky. I, for one, will be less interested in login into Medium if I find only serious articles.

(For perspectives on the boost and fiction on Medium, you can read this or this by Jay C Wells and May More 💜 Tales.)

Conclusion

People writing for the fun of it don’t care about all this and won’t in the future. But it will impact people trying to reach as many readers as possible, and we can be thankful for this opportunity Coach Tony gave us to reflect on our craft.

What do we want to do with our writing? Do we want to have fun, or is it a business? Is it a book? What is our long-term plan?

Here are two articles (one by me, one by Malky McEwan) that can help you think about these questions.