The New Medium Partner Program Has a Big Flaw in its Design

The new MPP leaves new writers in the dust because of a glaring loophole (but maybe it was designed that way)

When I first joined Medium back in May of this year, I hadn’t written a personal journal in almost 20 years. My writing had only consisted of formal emails and massive powerpoint presentations, which left little room for creativity and flair.

That’s one of the reasons I was looking forward to writing on Medium — to be able to express myself without constraints. I had a lot of pent up ideas from all my years in business and travels, and I was ready to put pen to paper to start expressing my thoughts.

The only problem was — I had no idea how to do it. When I quit my job to travel around, I had several friends suggest Medium as a platform to use. After a little research, I thought it was perfect!

Early beginnings of a new hobby

I signed up and made my first ‘story’ (since updated) and posted one more a couple of weeks later.

I started drawing for a while and had to do some contract work for a bit, so I let the writing thing drag for a while until the end of September.

That’s when I got serious about writing on Medium and made it a goal to be one of my new main hobbies.

I’ve since written 40+ articles and am now quite active on the platform.

And herein lies the problem

The thing is, I didn’t know about curation jail and how difficult it is to get out of it now. I never realized I was in it, even after I read about the concept.

I thought I just had to simply get better at my writing, make it more suitable to Medium’s style, and consistently produce good quality output.

I was very wrong.

Curation jail or curation maximum-security prison?

I wrote a lot in October about a few different subjects. One topic I got into was writing about Medium (the platform itself) as I was researching so much on the subject.

Firstly, Medium articles can’t be curated.

I knew that, and I was okay with it. But my volume of ‘curatable’ articles started piling up, and nothing was happening.

I thought for sure that the quality of my writing was improving.

I started using Grammarly. I started following the curation guidelines to the ‘T’ — all to no avail.

Time to check

In early November, I finally had the what-should’ve-been-obvious bright idea to check every single one of my articles to see if I had the dreaded:

“Our curators were not able to review this story for distribution in topics due to high volume. This story will still be shared with followers.”

As I thought, all my articles had the above.

Until I checked out those first two articles from way back in May and June.

They were reviewed— and rejected! I was almost happy for a moment, until the reality set in that I was securely in curation jail for good now.

At least I know why I got in there. I made some small but vital mistakes in my first two articles that didn’t follow the guidelines.

I also took a few months off from writing, surely that will also put you behind bars.

How to get out

You’ll see a lot of popular Medium authors like Shaunta Grimes, Brian Rowe, and Casey Botticello advise how to get out of curation jail, and it’s all pretty valid, if not scary.

You’ll usually see advice along these lines:

1. Ensure all your articles follow the curation guidelines exactly, and don’t over-promote yourself or hawk wares in your articles if you want them curated
2. Get published in one of the Medium publications or one of the big private ones (hint: that ain’t easy for noobies my friends)
3. Write to [email protected] and send them some of your work that you feel could’ve been curated
4. Delete your account and start over from scratch (and getting rid of all your followers at the same time ☹️)

The new Medium Partner Program came along

Assuming you had point #1 covered perfectly, then points #2–4 were all very valid — up until the end of October when they changed the MPP system.

There was an unexpected change to point number 3, they no longer allow it.

When I had originally found about that suggestion, through Facebook groups and other authors on here, I was excited to try it and escape!

But I got a different response than I was expecting:

I asked around on the Facebook Medium groups and it became quickly apparent that this was the new standard reply.

No more requesting to be curated!

That sucks. But I can understand it.

Why did they stop accepting requests for curation?

The sheer volume of daily requests to the 35+ curators they have at Medium is surely a daunting task.

That’s why it’s very likely they have a sorting system to make their lives easier — and thus how people can be put into curation jail.

It makes sense, those few curators need to optimize their time every day sorting through the thousands of submissions.

I also have a strong feeling that each curator focuses on specific topics (if you ever go look at a Medium job posting, it kind of hints at this).

So it makes sense that if a single writer gets on the radar of a single curator, that curator’s job becomes much easier by repeatedly publishing work from that same writer — as long as the quality remains high.

This would probably explain why if you look up other articles on Medium about curation, you’ll often see either rates of 0% curation (like yours truly) or 30–70% rates, depending on the authors.

Changes to Medium that we often overlook

Another titillation in my stomach is that Medium’s growth of the MPP has gone through a huge boom since August of this year.

I can’t prove it, as they don’t publish the numbers, but we do know that there are now 34 million Medium members (whether paid or unpaid I’m not sure).

How do I know? Every member automatically follows this person:

Again, this doesn’t help those poor curators, imagine having a team of 35+ and having to sort through 34 million people potentially sending a new article every day!

I’m sure the number is ‘only’ in the thousands, but still, that is a daunting number.

Unless Medium has matched the number of curators to match the growth of subscribers, it makes the chance of an individual author getting noticed even harder.

Of course, subscriber growth is good for the platform as it means they’ve validated their business model. It’s also great for the writers as it reduces the ‘platform risk’ of the company going bankrupt tomorrow.

But, but, but, I’m still stuck in prison!

One last aspect to the flaw

I think the last simple reason for Medium removing the option to email a request for curation is that the word got out about that strategy.

They must’ve started accepting it as a favor here and there in the early days. But word got out on some Medium posts in September, and then it spread massively in the Facebook Medium groups.

Think back to that busy bee curator, already being inundated with a huge increased amount of traffic the last few months, now also having their email inbox flooded with forwarded curation requests.

I’m sure answering all these emails were also part of their KPI’s too. There must’ve been a mini-revolt after a few weeks among them!

And again, I don’t blame them.

We’ve all had those crazy busy jobs before and it absolutely sucks when the workload is increased with no foreseeable slowdown in the future — after all, Medium is still ever-growing.

That leaves us with the flaw

There is an unmentioned quirk about becoming a paying member of Medium — your first few posts will be reviewed by the curators!

I imagine this was a nice little strategy and bonus for people signing up in the older days of Medium.

If I signed up, had followed the curation guidelines, and got curated with a huge boost of traffic in that first week of writing, I’d be grinning from ear to beer!

I’d also be telling dozens of my friends about it — and I’m sure Medium knew that.

Cool idea, and it worked great for a long time.

There’s one problem with it (or maybe there isn’t)

Many of the popular authors on Medium that I read, especially the ones touting 50%+ curation rates, were already authors and writers before they joined Medium. (T.S. Johnson rings a bell for this category, go follow her for awesome noobie Medium advice!)

Or, they joined Medium years ago and have a good head start on the noobies here.

Nothing wrong with either of those scenarios at all!

It’s great to learn from experts in the field, and it’s awesome that most of them are quite open in sharing how to improve in all aspects of blogging on here.

The problem I want to point out is that noobie bloggers, especially if Medium is your first blog, are set up to fail.

All noobs go directly to jail, do not pass publishers, do not collect $200

I speak from experience in this. I joined, I excitedly wrote a couple of long, very personal articles, and I ignored the curation guidelines. Sure, I am to blame on that front.

But let me ask you a question.

When was the last time you read a website’s instructions before you began using it?

Never? Same here.

And that’s why the curation review for noobies doesn’t quite make sense for me. By design, it will aid those that are experienced in writing and blogging.

For people new to the platform and blogging/writing, their first work is often of sh*te quality.

Mine certainly was. (Maybe still is? 😬)

If you’re brand new to blogging/Medium and reading this, yours probably is too. It doesn’t mean the content you’re writing isn’t great and intriguing. It just needs to fit Medium’s style before it can be curated.

And that takes time.

I believe it was probably only after heavily reading other author’s tips and tricks on Medium over a few weeks, while writing an article almost every day, that I finally improved my writing enough to be considered for curation.

Only by that time, it wasn’t considered.

<Queue sound of a jail cell locking>

What could Medium do instead?

I need to preface the following by stating that maybe this is exactly what the product managers at Medium have planned — on purpose.

Medium has stated, after all, that their idea for the platform is to have the best work promoted to the top.

Having a mandatory curation review for all new members is a good way to instantly filter out noobs from pros.

It just really sucks for the noobs.

I’d propose that Medium could do two alternative actions to help encourage people to become better writers on their platform — and not end up leaving it.

1. Perform the curation review after 1 month from the point of a member signing up, on the next article a member publishes
2. Do a scheduled curation review every 3 or 6 months for every member that is categorized as ‘active’ — whatever that categorization may actually be

Hell, they could even keep the new member curation review, after all, this is just a matter of human resources.

So how will you escape J.J. Pryor?

Unless Medium changes their policies (which is almost inevitable given their history), I only really have two options:

1. Get published in a large publication (maybe it’s only in a Medium publication?)
2. Delete my account, start a new one, lose all my followers, and repost all my articles

I’ve put in a lot of time building my following using this method, and I’d rather not just toss out all of that work. It’s gotten me 1000+ followers in the last 7 weeks alone.

That leaves me with only point #1 as an option — getting published in a big publication.

So that’s what I’ll be trying to do from now on. I wrote 5 articles this week and submitted them for the first time, and as of yet, I haven’t heard a peep. I hear that’s the usual response these days — that is, no response.

But I’ll keep trying, a few times every week.

I’d hope some of my work would be enough to get published on its own, but we have 34 million potential competitors here.

My last tip for the day: At some point soon, I’ll start tweeting the editors directly with my posts and responding to their articles.

I wonder how many annoying-yet-polite pokes it will take for me to get noticed?

Stay tuned to see 😊

‘Rant’ over.

For those looking for help finding publications to escape curation jail with, here’s a bunch of helpful curated lists:

Have a wonderful day and check out some of my other stuff here. Click here to sign up for my once a week newsletter!