The Perpetual Medium Gerbil Wheel of “Almost There” Earnings

You will never, ever get there. That’s how this is designed, apparently.

I am weary of Medium earnings stories, like many of us, and have rarely spoken of what I make on this platform. I find it offensive when people brag about how their stories fare, if for no other reason than the constantly-shifting algorithm has made it well-nigh impossible for many of us to make any kind of dime.

Today, in my once-a-month rant, I wanted to respond to a piece I saw yesterday from a woman who has been on Medium, for a year, in which she pleads with Ev. Here is her story:

Kindly, this is not an indictment of this writer. It is an indictment of the monumentally useless and silly effort to reach Ev Williams, who likely never sees our articles and most assuredly doesn’t give a rat’s ass if the behavior of the platform is any indication. Kristi Keller and I are in agreement on this.

Don’t waste your time, folks. He likely doesn’t read our stuff, will never read our stuff, and will not respond NOR will he change anything to help us make money. He likely doesn’t care about anything of the sort. That is my opinion only, but it is borne out by the behaviors of this and other online writing platforms.

I had a conversation with my social media buddy JC yesterday. We were reviewing the fourth time in as many years that Medium has jerked the rug out from under its writers with an algorithm change. He has watched this happen, listened to me agonize about how after immense effort (YOU try writing some 1800-plus articles in four years, Sparky), right about the time I get to the four-figure point where the income is JUST enough to cover my bills,

WHOOPS HOLY SHIT Oh, sorry, the algorithm….

And hey, it’s for the greater good everyone, just wait a while you’ll see.

This time around I went from nearly $80 per day to about $30 a day nearly overnight. That’s the fourth time that’s happened, yet my numbers in terms of followers keep going up and up and up and up. And up and up and up.

I saw an article which said just wait and see, it’s all good. Really? You’re just the writer Medium wants. You really believe that it’s all about us, and helping us be successful. Good luck with that, Sparky.

No, we don’t see. If you’re fairly new and this hasn’t repeatedly happened to you, you write (dumb) articles about how well-meaning Ev and Medium really are and hang in there.

No, folks.

The writer above noted the departure of Matt Lillywhite, which I also noticed. She likely hasn’t been around long enough to remember Kris Gage and other superb writers who have ghosted Medium and are all over the Internet but most assuredly no longer on Medium.

Why? They got smart. They picked up their marbles and went elsewhere.

Those of us who have hung in for various reasons, not the least of which for my part is that I very much appreciate the community, have watched the bait and switch over and over and over and over again.

And it won’t stop, either. Because there are enough new people who haven’t watched the progression over time, and who REALLY HONESTY AND TRULY BELIEVE that Ev et al are out to help us be successful.

No. They aren’t. They are out to milk us for our work ethic. The way I see it, and I’ve watched this too many times by now and JC is the one who pointed this out this week, is that each time the algorithm gets changed, you and I are left feeling that if only we just worked a little harder we could make up the difference and be back where we were.

Yeah, well, Sparky, I’ve done that four times now in four years. Not only do you NEVER make up the difference, but the system is also designed, like a casino, so that the house always wins. You are always just that close, and then you lose, so just get more quarters and keep playing. The house always wins.

The Medium house is in turmoil. Lots of us wrote last year that Medium’s days were numbered. We were wrong, but we weren’t wrong about how the Medium that we once knew and loved had died. Turnover, as reported by Glassdoor and other places, was horrendous. That kind of bloodbath is usually indicative of a toxic culture.

So the house changed and is constantly changing, as we see with all the NEW WAYS TO EARN MONEY on a platform that was once purely for writers and readers. Now it’s a platform perfectly made for scammers, full of haters and hackers and plagiarists, and folks using cancel culture to boot folks off the platform if they dare to have an outrageous opinion. Just happened to a buddy of mine last week, who got accused of inciting hate. Honey, if that’s all it takes, read some of the comments we get as women writing about our rape history. But that’s just a sideshow.

This is about our earnings.

You will likely never get back to where you were, by definition. You have to redouble your efforts to even approach where you were, and if you get too close, WHOOPS, algorithm change, it’s for the greater good, guys. We really are that stupid if we believe the greater good pitch.

Puh-leeze.

Better writers than I am have pointed out the Multi-Level Marketing approach that the big writing platforms have stooped to. Again, if you’ve been around long enough you see the larger trend. Those platforms are doing what the major book publishing houses did many decades ago. ANY hope of getting published by a New York Big House is out the window unless you are a very well-established writer with a HUGE following and YOU provide the marketing plan AND the marketing, and YOU provide the eyeballs and YOU do all the work, while THEY own the publishing rights and your content.

In other words, to get your name on a book published by the big publishing houses, you front all the money, they own all the rights, pay you pennies for each book sold. Sound like a good deal?

The arrogance is breathtaking. I self-published. So did Shani Silver. We own the rights to our own content, we do the marketing, WE KEEP THE MONEY.

After all, if you and I are going to do all the back-breaking work, why the hell should we hand over all the keys to the kingdom just for the ego hit of having our names on a book published by a big house?

The same question goes for all the other businesses who have adopted the model of making us do all their marketing for them while promising a constantly shifting, unpredictable, and utterly capricious, and opaque payment system.

You take that thievery and look at what Newsbreak and Medium and Hubspot and most other online platforms have done: YOU do all the referral work and YOU do all legwork and YOU do all the marketing to drive eyeballs to THEIR website. In other words, the guy on the street does all the unpaid marketing work for these big platforms, all of which have loads more money than we do. But it’s packaged in such a way that if you haven’t been around long enough, if you aren’t old enough and experienced enough to see all the parallels, you can get sucked in by the slick marketing. The implicit promise of if you just did this much more work you would make this much money.

Such systems favor hackers and thieves. As all the platforms have discovered. Their attempts to manage those folks ended up, as they always do, damaging their best performers. Roz Warren and many other damned good writers dumped Newsbreak when their base pay system got canned because hackers figured out how to game the system. Honest and hard-working writers who played by the rules got slammed.

I dumped Newsbreak where I still am a top writer. They still send me badges and want me to come back. In fact, I just did a write-up on what Newsbreak did to its writers for a reporter. I haven’t written to them since early August. Other top writers such as Dr. Mehmet Yildiz have watched their income plummet. He has 600 stories, I have 1200 followers there and 157 stories. I went from close to a grand a month to .95. You see my point. Dr. Yildiz reported much the same. There, you are rewarded, again, only if YOU do the legwork. Unlike Medium, you are punished and/or booted off the platform if you DARE to link back to your own work. You are there to work for them and only them for fractions of a penny.

Why on earth would you do that for fractions of pennies when you and I are much better off doing that legwork to our own websites?

Medium went with the same model. Those of us who know MLM when we see it recognized the second that Medium shifted to a referral model. Same thing. While plenty of folks have no issue soliciting people to join, I do. If folks want to join just to read my work, they will. And they do because I’m a damned good writer and I have spent four years working my aging ass off to build an online community. Four years of doing precisely what all the pointy heads said to do, which is why, after each time that Medium slashes my earnings by half, in a few months of extreme labor, I am back close to where I was, but with many thousands of more followers.

The numbers don’t add up. My stats plummet, yet Medium sends me all these happy-dappy notices that I have fifty new followers! I have many times the followers I had several years ago, and am making far less. Again, the numbers DO. NOT. ADD. UP. To wit: In January of 2020, I had 4135 followers and was making close to three grand a month.

Today I have approaching 9600 followers and am making half that. Back this summer I had worked my ass off to get back up close to three grand a month again and virtually overnight it was sliced in half. I still produce on average, two articles a day. And I am no rookie, nor is my material the kind of sewage that people complain about.

THE NUMBERS DO NOT ADD UP.

Because algorithm changes. The fact that the payment system is opaque should tell us everything. You can write in and ask for clarity, and what you get are carefully-crafted responses that tell you nothing. A good journalist knows when people are dodging the question.

You and I will not likely ever regain where we were. It’s fair to say that had Ev left us alone, those of us who have put in the yeoman’s work would be making enough to pay the bills and then some. Especially those of us who have done the hard labor of commenting, responding, engaging, linking, and all the courtesies which make us worth following. We CARE. That care eats up one hell of a lot of time.

I am weary of having other writers bark at me like junkyard dogs that the platform has the right to change any time they like. Will you please just shut up? Of course, I know that I’m a Fortune 100 consultant, or used to be. GTFU will you? That’s not the point. I am pointing out the trends, what I see, and where I think this is heading. I am no expert, but my experience, and that of other writers, bears me out.

Besides, all those folks who claimed to be doing SO well last year? Crickets. Reminds me of all those folks who posted shiny new AFTER photos of the Great Weight Loss, then quietly disappeared into Regained-it-Hell. It is astounding how swiftly those folks disappear when it turns out that things change fast for them just as they do for the rest of us. And as it turns out, we might have had a point after all.

Those of you who have no issue with cattle-prodding people to join Medium so that you can make half their annual fee, I have issues with you. That doesn’t make me right. It makes me moral. I find such incentives morally reprehensible because they are profit vs. personal values-driven. I prefer to earn money based on quality writing. Most of my readers are passionate about my work for this reason alone.

I am weary of this.

We are slave labor.

Last year a number of the best anti-racism writers left the platform and they are working hard- and successfully-to create their own platforms. Sharon Hurley Hall, Marley K., and my friend Rosennab all put in the labor to make the move. I have been working on it but it’s slow, and I don’t have other outside income sources so the progress isn’t as swift as I’d like. However, after this last slap in the face by yourfriendsatMedium, I am now putting in a lot more work to establish my website. I am tired of having Medium carve out much bigger pieces of earnings that I labored to produce, with increasingly smaller returns for increasingly greater effort.

There are plenty of smart folks out there who are using Medium wisely, and admittedly I have not. I care deeply about those who read my stuff, and that care has translated into 9.5 thousand followers. I produce new members for Medium not because I solicit but because of the quality of my writing. To be frank, I deserve the benefit of that labor, and so do you.

So while I will remain on Medium, I am going to start creating content that will not appear here. I am doing more work first on my website and importing those stories. I am focusing on my own business. Medium is part of that strategy, which I have to learn just as I had to learn Medium.

In the meantime, I strongly suggest you look at what August Birch writes about developing an email list. This is work I have to do as well.

The platform does not exist to serve us. Anyone who has been on long enough and is any kind of an observer can see this. If you’re new here, don’t quit your day job. It is not designed for most of us to make a living wage. I would recommend reading what René Junge has done to use the system to his advantage. I am downloading his articles, as I also subscribed to August’s email training program.

I tend to be way too loyal, and once established, I work far too long in relationships that have gone toxic. That is my lifetime habit to believe that those to whom I demonstrate loyalty will return it. I am wrong about this. My loyalty is to my readers, my community, those whose eyeballs and comments are immensely important to me, not to Medium per se.

Medium isn’t a monolith, and it’s made up of folks who care about things and their kids and have bills. They have to toe a party line. A good many of them left for whatever reason. I’d love to get my hands on the stats which would reveal how many of the original employees are still with Medium. My uneducated guess is not many.

Just as with my bank in Colorado, when the original founder died, before the flowers died on that man’s grave the bank shifted from a community-minded, engaged bank to a fee-slapping, life-sucking monster, like most banks. All the life went out of it. It is the American way. Profits over people.

It is my hope to invite those readers where they don’t have to tolerate the influx of sludge that Medium pours into our inboxes. They may or may not join me. Many of my readers left Medium because they could no longer tolerate the junk that they had to wade through to get to my material and that of other writers who really do the work of solid content. They wrote me that very thing, then disappeared.

Don’t blame them one bit.

But I am tired of doing this kind of slave labor for increasingly smaller returns for an organization that effectively abuses its best writers. I am hardly alone. I am in contact with plenty of other Medium writers who are making the same plans. The reason I will not leap to another platform is that most are using the precise same techniques to push the writers to do the marketing that is their job to do.

You and I are being manipulated. If you don’t see it, then you are blind.

But that’s just me, and this is just a rant. Doesn’t make me right, but I am a damned good observer and consultant. And before you bark at me that I think I’m entitled, again, GTFU. You and I are entitled to a fair wage for the work we do, and we are bloody well entitled to a very clear understanding of how we are paid. My guess is that there are damned few people who produce the volume I do, and who have put in the time to comment some ten thousand times on others’ work.

You do whatever works for you. But I am slowly but surely going to focus on my own platform, which, at 68, isn’t as easy were I just 28. I will still be here barring being booted off the platform for some capricious decision, which in our “attack-the-word-choice” culture seems far more likely. So far, at least, I still make Medium money, because folks join to read me. I am a profit-producing farm animal.

Good folks have told me they will follow me. Please watch for bread crumbs. That is a work in progress.

And a final word. Lest you see me as an ungrateful wretch, that is hardly the case. I am indebted to this platform a lot. However, like any relationship that has gone sour in certain ways, you and I have the right to call out what we see. We also have the responsibility to do what it takes to move on. I’ve shirked that responsibility in part because Medium is relatively easy, and moving on is much harder, and I will miss those readers who choose not to join me where I must go play for my financial sanity.

So some of my stuff will still show up here. But like my anti-racist writing friends who are both more social media-savvy than I am and also have shown themselves to be more willing to make the leap, it’s time I started doing the same. It is far easier for me to risk leaping out of an airplane than making this time-consuming shift to a new model, but I’m out of excuses. And I am running out of time to make such large shifts for income.

But leap I must. Even if it takes baby steps, and it will leap I must. I hope Dear Reader will leap with me. If I’m worth reading and following, perhaps you will.

Find me at www.walkaboutsaga.com. Thanks for reading.