This is Why You Are Making Less $$ on Medium as a Writer

Teresa’s monthly Medium musings

I’m not sure why I torture myself trying to understand Medium. I mostly don’t give a shit about Medium or what it does. I write things, or not, and they send me money, or not. For $5 a month, Medium has directly or indirectly grossed me about $12K.

Whateves.

I too have noticed my earnings have fallen, but so has my production. I don’t think it’s necessarily my production that’s the problem — not all of it anyway. So I figure, there has to be a reason for it, right? It’s not some magical thing that’s happened. There’s been no spell cast upon us. No, it’s much simpler than that.

I make an extra $11.06 a month because some people found their way to Medium through me.

Yay me! Yay Medium! Yay people!

I’m told I get about $2.27 each from them, unless they paid for a year’s subscription, so I get a bit less. I don’t do maths with any precision, but I do logic with precision, so hear me out.

If someone is giving me $2.27 a month, then they are giving Medium $2.73 a month. Medium used to get $5 a month from everyone, and then paid writers out of it.

So, it stands to reason that Medium never put much more than about $2.27 per subscription in the pool of cash the writers fought over, doesn’t it? My guess it was slightly more, but not much.

Put your tinfoil on, here comes the conspiracy theory.

This means the people I attracted to Medium don’t give other writers any money, no matter how much they read. That $11.06 Medium used to share amongst the writers now comes to me — no matter what I do.

I’m sure Medium likely throws another $0.2 or so into the kitty from my recruits, in order to provide some form of pay-per-read incentive, but that leaves far less money in play for writers to fight over.

Of course, not all the readers are recruited to Medium this way, because this is a brand-new effort. So why are reads and cash falling now? My guess is the payment model has started to shift towards a subscription based model where payments based on reads won’t matter so much.

Why? Any reader recruited by someone else isn’t worth pursuing after the fact. Their reads don’t count beyond the few dimes Medium tosses into the writer’s kitty every month.

So why shift the model now, if it would cut writer payments? It forces writers to become Medium’s recruitment team NOW— if they want to maintain their income.

Medium has tried a few models like giving bonuses, or guaranteeing a minimum income each month, but now, it’s turned that work over to writers so they can build their own fixed income program.

So yay! I’m going to get $11.06 this month whether I write a thing or not!

That sounds pretty good!

Actually, it sounds like shit.

Under this model, if you’re a better recruiter, you’ll get more money. If you ain’t, you won’t. And it sounds like shit because it’s $11.06 other writers can no longer fight for. This way there’ll be less incentive for writers to improve. Working harder as a new writer on Medium won’t do anything if you don’t bring a paying audience with you, so they’ll be apt to pack it in quicker.

Worse still, a writer could simply stop writing, and still make this money. Let’s say I brought in 1000 people, and so made $2,270 a month? I could basically stop writing other than maintaining the bare minimum, to keep it all.

The people who stayed on Medium would forget their money was coming to me, and besides it wouldn’t matter if they remembered, would it? They’d keep reading without giving me and my lack of output a second thought.

It’s not like a reader’s going to quit, then rejoin Medium so their money goes to someone else, just because I stopped writing. And because of that, there’s no incentive for me to write better, or at all — because the incentive is on recruiting, not writing.

My guess is the pool is getting artificially smaller right now to force writers to adopt the the new model. Why? Because Medium isn’t about good writing or writing at all.

It’s about making money for Ev and his partners.

And this is mostly why I don’t give a shit about what Medium does. It’s a business that lets me make some money for a very small investment on my part. I, like Ev, am here to make money, and when the money dries up, I, like Ev, will go elsewhere. This is my side gig just as it is Ev’s side gig.

The future of Medium isn’t the small-time amateur writer hoping to grow a following. And that’s because they are unlikely to recruit readers. There will be a very small carrot at the end of a very long stick for them to keep the dream alive, but that’s it.

No, the future of Medium is for the writers who recruit the most readers — whether they can write well or not.

Want to make money here? Write about sex. My top performing work I mention here isn’t at $650 any more, it’s sitting at round $2200 —

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© Teresa J. Conway, 2021