The Medium Update for 2022
12 small changes through 2020–2021 add up to a big directional shift for 2022.
What will Medium be in 2022?
Medium announced they were moving towards a “relational” model a year ago. Since then, they’ve made several small changes that are important to keep up with if you want to get a bigger picture of the overall direction of the platform. Here, I offer a quick roundup of the (many!) changes and my thoughts on what it all means for Medium in 2022.
I sent this out to my email subscribers on Friday and it received such a positive response that I wanted to share it a little wider. If you want to sign up for my newsletter yourself, I send out writing advice and blogging tips twice a week!
First, the changes (in no particular order):
- Acquisition of Glose and Pragmatic Programmer books. Glose is a reading hub; Pragmatic Programmers is a popular programming resource whose backlog was acquired by Medium to make the membership offer more value to readers.
- Blogrolls. You now see which authors/pubs each author follows. Here’s my video on this feature,
- Lists. You can now save stories (your own and those of others) under lists, adding color and commentary if you choose. E.g. I have a Today I Learned list.
- The tag page revamp. Authors can add 5 tags to a story to tell readers (and the algorithm) what a story is about. Each tag has its own page, with all the tagged stories on it, like the writing tag page. These pages now contain much more information than they used to. They didn’t announce it, but here’s my video on it.
- Topics pages are sunsetting. Medium used to curate stories to one of about ~100 topic pages, like Books or Money. Now those will be replaced by the tag pages to allow additional nuance. Books are a wide topic, after all! However, I expect that Medium will still use topics to power the curation engine behind the scenes. It just means tags matter a little more than they used to.
- You can now directly email your Medium email subscribers. When I self-publish a story, I can email it out to the 177 people who have chosen to “subscribe” to me on Medium. (This is not the same as the 30k-odd followers I have.)
- Your email subscribers can now email…you? There hasn’t been an announcement, but if you go to settings and select “Audience development” and then “promote subscriptions” and scroll down, you’ll see the option to enable this.
- Referral system. If a new reader uses my membership link to sign up for Medium membership, I earn $2.26 every month as long as they stay a member.
- Redesign of the home page and app. It looks quite different — less topic-driven, more related to who you follow.
- Limit the MPP to 100+ followers. Anyone used to be able to sign up and make money, but now it’s limited to those who have 100+ followers and publish every six months.
- Auto-curation for certain individuals/publications. Again, not an announcement but just something I’ve noticed. Curation, also called distribution, is when Medium elevates your story to a group of readers who are interested in the subject of your story even if they don’t follow you. This used to be a manual process but now appears automated. If you’re lucky AND consistently publish high-quality content, you get auto-curated. Some publications also have this power for specific topics.
- The profile page redesign. More customization options.
- Publications are shutting down. Medium stopped funding most pubs and in response, many of them shut down, like The Ascent, P.S. I Love You, The Post-Grad Survival Guide, and more. Publication owners don’t earn money from publishing stories unless it’s by promoting their content, so it’s a lot of work for little reward.
What does this all mean? Well, I don’t know for sure, but here are my best guesses.
What does this all mean for Medium in 2022 (and you)?
- Medium is focusing on building smaller, stronger audiences instead of bigger, viral, more impersonal ones. This means people like me find it harder to go viral, reaching 1000s or 10000s of readers. But it’s easier to build a connection with a smaller group of dedicated readers.
- They’re (kind of, maybe) trying to oust publications. Publications have a confusing role on Medium. They get in the way of the “relational” Medium. If you see a story in a publication, do you form a connection with the author or the pub? I believe that’s why they’ve unveiled so many new features that only matter if you self-publish. For example, when I self-publish, I can choose to email that story to my Medium email subscribers right off the bat. I can’t do that if I publish in a publication. Also, readers can now auto-email you as a way to respond to your self-published stories. However, I have experimented with self-publishing both as an established and brand new author and found publications still get me far more views than self-publishing.
- Curation is dying (or dead already!). Curation used to be a silver bullet on your stories. If you got distributed, you’d get 10x the views on an uncurated story. Now, not so much. They’ve outsourced curation to publications and automation, from what I can tell. That means a lot more bad quality content is getting more views (which also explains why views are down for most big writers). The fact that they’re subsetting Topic Pages, which used to house curated stories, in exchange for Tag Pages, which are self-assigned by writers, also means curation matters less. Medium no longer wants to gatekeep quality. Instead, they want to serve as a connection between reader and writer, whatever that writer publishes.
Overall? I don’t think it’s a real business strategy to go viral on Medium anymore. The only two people I see doing so consistently anymore are Umair Haque and Jessica Wildfire, and most people lack the ability to write in that style (or don’t want to).
My views and earnings from Medium are down. But I am building a stronger connection with fewer readers, which I really like.
What you should do to write on Medium in 2022:
- Keep writing quality on Medium. Short-term strategies come and go, but the one thing that has remained consistent is that long-term quality is rewarded. It takes time to grow a devoted audience, but new writers will now find it easier than I did when I started. There are more tools in place to turn Medium into your blogging home.
- Start to think about how to expand off Medium, too. I will still be writing here as long as they’ll have me, but the majority of my income now comes from my freelance writing business. And I like it like that. 😄
- Take advantage of the new features. Been putting off redesigning your profile page? Not quite sure what to do with the new tags pages? Not implemented the referral system? Give yourself a Sunday morning and take care of all that research and work. Medium has created new tools to help, but if you’re not taking advantage of them, you’re missing out.
Medium in 2022
Medium in 2022 will look and function quite different from the Medium I was familiar with back in 2018. But no matter what changes they make, quality still rules and it’s still just a platform, not a magic money-making bullet.
All these changes point to a different direction for Medium in 2022. This Medium, to summarize, will be one focused on building small, dedicated readers for writers who are serious about quality. In some ways, I feel that Medium is truer to its original vision of being home to quality writers for interested readers.
I can’t wait to see how Medium in 2022 develops.