The New Medium Partner Program is Bad for Quality Writing! (2023)
The disadvantages of Medium’s new remuneration scheme and how Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine answered my concerns.
Table of Contents
Introduction How was the remuneration (2019–2023)? ↳ Referral program ↳ Reading time How is the remuneration now? Why do some high-quality articles receive less money? ↳ Lower read-through rate ↳ Less engagement ↳ Boosted less often How does Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine think about it? What should be changed? Conclusion Resources More articles
Introduction
Medium introduced a new remuneration for users that are part of the Medium partner program. Their target was to take incentives from click-baiting and AI-generated content and give it to human writers that create high-quality articles. In my opinion, these are the right intentions but their new system disadvantages some groups. For people writing about programming their income dropped significantly. My personal earnings from Medium dropped to one-tenth (I swear I only write high-quality articles). In this article, I explain why Medium did the wrong thing with the right attention and how to solve the problem. If you have experienced something similar (or not), please share your experience in the comments.
How was the remuneration (2019–2023)?
The old remuneration was based on reading time and the referral program.
Referral program
For each member that signed up through your referral link, you get more or less 2,27$ of their monthly fee as long as they stay in the partner program. This is most often only a small part of the total income. It was around 10% for me.
Referral income = ~2,27$ * number of referred members
Reading time
The money you earn for reading time depends on how much time the user spends on your story compared to other stories. Each premium Medium user has a certain share of the 5$ that gets distributed to all writers from which the person is reading articles. The share is not commonly known and probably depends if the user paid a yearly fee (60$ a year) or monthly (5$ a month) and if the user is a referred user (2,27$ go to the writer that referred the user). I estimate that the share is between 2$ and 2,5$. If, e.g. a user spends half of their reading time reading your articles, you will receive half of their share.
I did not find how often the reading time revenue gets calculated. It could be that it is calculated daily for every user or only once a month. For me, the income from reading time was around about 90% of the total revenue.
Reading time income = readers share ($) * relative reading time they spend reading your article (0 < x < 1)
How is the remuneration now?
The new remuneration is more opaque. The following formula represents the new remuneration.
- Engagement points are everything a user can do. This includes the reading time, claps, highlights, replies, and people following after reading your story for the first time.
- The follower bonus depends on your followers and the number of followers of the publication in which you published.
- A boost gives a special bonus.
- All these factors get in some unknown way added up and then multiplied by the same read-through rate adjustment. An article is now defined as read when the reader spends more than 30 seconds reading the article.
Why do some high-quality articles receive less money?
This is hard to say. Because the remuneration calculation is completely intransparent it is impossible to tell exactly why. In the following, I describe my personal assumptions that apply to technical articles.
Lower read-through rate
Technical articles have a lower read-through rate. I write programming articles and for most of them, you need some focus because they are complex and often need your computer to check the code. If you sit in a bus and open your Medium app you will continue reading “Barbenheimer” but you will most often not continue reading an article that includes code and complex topics.
Furthermore, programmers (like myself) tend to open a lot of different Medium articles to read only the one that suits their needs best. In this case, the read-through rate also goes down.
Nikos Kafritsas added an important argument in the comments:
Plus, in technical articles, people go back and forth to execute code, potentially leaving and coming back to an article.
That inevitably slashes the read ratio in technical articles.
Less engagement
From my personal experience, I would say that technical articles receive less engagement than articles on lifestyle topics because they are less emotional. I assume that articles about a personal story receive more often claps because people are touched. An article about programming can provide incredible value but does receive less engagement because it is less emotional.
Boosted less often
Technical articles are most often not interesting for a broad audience because they only have a small target audience. If you write an article about automating your whole life with Python, this can be incredibly helpful for a smaller group that knows Python and wants to automate something. For most people that do not program, do not know Python or do not want to automate something, this article does not have any value. I assume that technical articles resume less often a boost because they target a smaller audience.
How does Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine think about it?
Because my earnings dropped I was disappointed. Every month I increased the revenue from Medium and I wanted to continue that. I do not depend on this money but it was a motivation for me to receive money from a self-employed activity that I really enjoy doing.
Therefore I have commented on the article Partner Program Changes Are Rolling Out Now by Tony Stubblebine (Medium’s CEO). Following the text.
Easier to read:
My earnings dropped from 5–7$ to 0.5$-0.7$ each day. For me, involving the read ratio is extremely bad. I write programming articles and for most of them, you need some focus because they are complex and often need your computer to check the code. Therefore, the read ratio is low but the (member) reading time is high. If somebody reads the article, she reads it for a longer time. In my opinion, the new remuneration is really bad for articles like mine and should be changed. For technical articles, there is no financial incentive anymore.
The next day I saw that some people responded to my comment. Also, big writers on Medium like The PyCoach, Kenneth Leung, James Julian, and Ashish Patel clapped for my response and I personally interpret that they experienced the same revenue drop. When I took a look at the notifications I thought that I knew the guy that responded from somewhere. It was Tony Stubblebine Medium’s CEO. Exciting!
Here is Tony’s response:
Easier to read:
I looked into this a bit. I think your read ratio is fine and it’s not going to be a problem. We changed the read calculation to just be “read for 30 seconds” but we haven’t released the new stats page that shows that yet. In that calculation you are getting read ratios above 40%. And it’s a bit hard to for me to tell about daily earnings but I don’t think daily earnings is a good lens at all. Last month most of your earnings were from two articles and that means the days when you earned the most were when those articles were popular. Neither are getting much traffic in August and you haven’t published anything new. A much better test is going to be whatever you publish next (if you aren’t too discouraged to do that).
Here is my reply to his text:
Hey Toni, first of all, I really appreciate that you took a look at my statistics. Who can claim that the CEO of Medium did that?
Nevertheless, I think your arguments are not valid. You mention the two articles that make up the main part of my earnings from last month. Their reading and their reading time did not change significantly but the earning dropped to nothing. Is the target of the new remuneration that only new articles are worth something and good-written old articles are worth nothing?
I do not primarily write for money but my motivation took a hit because I got the feeling that something “got taken away from me”.
In my opinion, your intentions are good but there are also losers from the new partner program remuneration that are [not] solely written by AI or use click-baiting.
I’m going to write an article about this at the week-end. I would be glad if you would read it!
Here are the statistics from the two mentioned articles. August starts when the earnings become zero. The clicks and read time did not change significantly but the earnings did. This takes only into account six and a half days in August and I continue watching the numbers but this is already statistically significant.
What should be changed?
1. Make the remuneration calculation transparent!
It is not possible to understand the calculation. Make it transparent and understandable to make it easier for writers to improve the statistics that matter.
2. Value reading time!
In my opinion, reading time is the most important factor for earnings. Medium is not only a place for emotional articles about lifestyle and personal stories. It is also a place where people write technical articles. To value this I propose using the reading time as the most important (if not the only) number that matters.
Conclusion
In my opinion, Medium should change the remuneration system. They had good intentions and wanted to value human writing with high quality but I assume that they (unintentionally) disadvantage complex articles like programming articles. To fix the result that complex articles get not valued and writers feel helpless they should make the calculations transparent and bring the importance back to reading time! If you have experienced something similar (or not) please share your experience in the comments.
Resources
- New Partner Program incentives focus on high-quality human writing (Medium article, Buster Benson, 2023)
- Partner Program Changes Are Rolling Out Now (Medium article, Tony Stubblebine, 2023)
- My comment on the article previous article and the response from Medium’s CEO Tony Subblebine (Medium comment, Max Zimmermann, 2023)
- Improving how we calculate writer earnings (Medium article, Emma Smith, 2019)
- Calculating earnings in the Partner Program (Medium Help Center, 2023)
