Report on the August 2023 Changes to Medium

Yes, this one is meta. It’s for my students.

Trigger warning: I’m about to write about writing on Medium. I know, lots of you are tired of it. This one isn’t for you. Please don’t come after me. Thank you!

But, if you’re one of my students (or you just want to learn) I wanted to share some about how the changes Medium made in August are affecting me. And what I’ve learned so far.

I’ve been writing on Medium since 2017. I have more than 3500 posts here. I’ve earned as much as $10,000 in a month directly from the Partner Program.

But not lately. Not even remotely. I mean, not even in the same galaxy. These are my thoughts and experiences withe changes that happened in August. This is a long one, with lots of screenshots.

The changes Medium’s made.

In August 2023 Medium made some fairly significant changes to their partnership program. I’m not going to go over all of them, but you can read about them from the horse’s mouth here:

They’ve added new countries that can join the Partner Program, and they plan to continue. They’ve lifted the 100 follower requirement for joining the program. And they’ve added a requirement to be a paid Medium Member before you can join the partner program (although, if you’re already part of the program and not paying, right now they haven’t required you to do that.)

Okay — now the biggie.

Medium has shifted the way they calculate writer earnings. Again.

In the beginning, writers were paid based on how many claps they got. It wasn’t obvious that you could clap more than once — so there was a rash of writers trying to teach their readers how to clap 50 times.

Then it was based on read time. If someone who was a paid member of Medium read your post, you’d get paid based on how long they spent reading your post.

Now — there’s a more complex calculation, apparently. Read time is still important — but they’ve changed what that means (more on that in a minute.) And other indicators of engagement matter, too. Things like highlights, claps, following, and leaving a comment.

This is significant: you’re only paid the FIRST time someone engages in each relevant way. So, no more trying to get people to do something more than once.

One clap counts the same as fifty from the same person. One highlight counts the same as a dozen from the same person.

If they engage — with one clap, one comment, one highlight, or by following you — you get get a point for each type of engagement and that increases your pay.

You’re paid a bonus if someone who follows you interacts and if you’re boosted. The post linked above says that we’ll get a bonus when someone who already follows us reads our post.

Nice. Very nice.

You’re also not paid at all if someone clicks away from your post after fewer than 30 seconds. Time will tell how that affects people who write very short posts.

Speaking of Boosting

Medium’s distribution system has always been very nontransparent and, if I’m being perfectly honest, frustrating. Here are their current guidelines.

Basically that all amounts to a big pile of ‘nothing much.’ There’s a lot of use of the word ‘may’ in there. And a lot of places where you post goes (the topic pages, the for you section) where readers don’t actually hang out. And where it will be pushed down the list so quickly, it almost doesn’t matter.

Also places where they might show you — but to almost no one, like at the bottom of other stories.

I can tell you that I have more than 40,000 followers and it’s not unusual for me to write a post that gets fewer than 100 views.

So, I appreciate that Medium has essentially finally come out and just said that distribution doesn’t mean what we wish it did.

Every single post that isn’t specifically excluded (like this one, because it’s meta) is ‘distributed.’ That just means it’s on the site and findable.

I love that they’re actually acknowledging that ‘distribution’ doesn’t mean much. We can finally lay that to rest.

Yes — you get paid if a Medium member finds and reads your post. But to get Medium to actually share your work with their readers, and even your followers really, you need the ‘boost.’

Everyone else can find it if they happen to look at their own feed when your post happens to be there or if they search for a topic you’ve tagged your post with.

Basically — to be boosted you have to add something to the wider conversation, add value to the reader, not use clickbait, show that you are the one to write the post, and then cross your fingers and hope that a human reader likes what you’ve written enough pull the trigger.

I’m planning a series of posts that goes deeper into each of the boost requirements.

They’ve made it clear that there is no penalty other than no distribution for writing a post that’s outside of their distribution channel, but doesn’t violate Medium’s rules. They call those stories Network Only. They’re still shown to your followers and your publications followers, but not to followers of tags.

Years ago, I used to use Upscribe to add forms to my posts. It worked well for me as a tool for building my email list. But Medium stopped curating posts with those forms, so I stopped using them.

But since I know that posts like this one will be Network Only anyway, I can use a form, if I want to. Which is interesting. The only guideline that I can see is the requirement to include a disclosure.

So, if you click the form below, your information will be transmitted offsite, off of Medium, directly to me via my email server. The TOS says that disclosure has to be immediately above the form or in the form itself (as below, where you actually have to click the box.)

Let’s see how that works. I’ll report back. I can tell you that there are some instances where having an easy way to join my email list would be more important to me than being boosted.

How the Changes Have Effected Me

Boosting started months ago, but up until I got the email about these changes coming, I’d never been boosted on Medium. Not once. I hadn’t purposefully tried, though. And to be honest, I was a little burned out on blogging.

With the changes, I felt like I needed to see if I could get myself boosted, to see how the changes would impact me on Medium.

I wrote this post.

I made sure it hit every one of their requirements. And it was boosted. Exciting.

They’ve changed the way the stats page looks, in the last day or two. Right now, here’s what it looks like on your stats page when you’re boosted. It shows up in two places on the story’s stats page. At the top where a little ‘boosted’ icon shows up next to the row of stats. And in the ‘views’ chart where a little boosted flag shows up on the day you were boosted.

As you can see, this post had a surge of reads over a couple of days and then it slowed down to 10 to 25 views a day. It looks like it went down to nothing because the surge went up to 400 views. Ten or twenty-five a day ten or so days in is significantly more than a non-boosted post of mine gets after a couple of weeks.

I published this post on July 23 and it was boosted the same day. I’m writing this on August 15 and it’s earned $105. On August 9, it had earned $100. So, the earnings have slowed along with the traffic.

Read Ratio Changes

One big change — really big — that Medium has made is in the way that they are calculating read ratios. I tend to write long posts that have lots of research links. My read ratios have historically been very low.

I took this screenshot on August 9.

A couple of days ago, though, they changed the stats page. Now the read ratio shows the percentage of readers who stay on your post more than 30 seconds.

Above, you can see the post I’ve been talking about had a 20% read ratio — that’s people who read all the way to the bottom of the post. They’ve removed read ratio from the front page of the stats, but you can see it on the story stats below.

Today the read ratio reads 56%. So, while 20% of my readers read to the bottom — 56% read for at least 30 seconds. And that’s how Medium is calculating your ‘read time’ for your pay now.

I am definitely being paid more.

Here’s a screenshot of my pay checks from Medium for all of 2023.

The August amount at the top represents August 1–14 and is $830.74.

I made less than $200 in June. I would have made less than $200 in July, too, but in the last week of the month I made more than $80 on that one boosted post — and that post boosted my reads on my other posts.

I get just over $80 in commissions from Medium every month for people who have become members via my link. So, in June, I actually made just over $100 from my stories. (I told you that my earnings haven’t been in the same galaxy as $10,000 a month.)

In August, I’ve earned just under $830 so far. That’s significant. I’ve written nine posts this month. Five of them were boosted. This month I’m going to break $1000 for the first time in two years.

I always write some new year posts in January that give me a pay boost in January and February. Also, my topic — writing, mostly fiction — is a classic new year’s resolution, so I get a boost from Google early in the year as well.

January and August of 2023 are both been months where I’ve written more than my current average. I’ve already earned just about what I made in January — in half of August.

There is a stark difference in pay between boosted and unboosted posts.

My boosted posts have all reached about $100 within two or three days. That’s the result of Medium sending people the link.

I have to go all the way back to January to get to a post that had more than 1000 views. Two of my August posts already have more than 1000 views. Two more have more than 800 views.

All of them even out after that initial hit of reads. But I’ll be interested to see if there are any posts that Medium decides to push out further. To more people over a longer period of time.

I’ve also noticed that my boosted posts all start getting readers coming from Google within a few days. I’ve wondered if that’s because of the initial traffic and engagement telling Google this post is worth sharing.

The amount of time I’ve spent blogging in the last week is worth $800 to me. I work on my blog posts for about an hour a day. I’ve had a couple that needed longer, which is why I’ve posted nine in fifteen days.

I’ve tried to analyze why a couple of posts weren’t boosted, even though I was careful with all of them to follow the boosting guidelines. And why others were. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

• Medium likes titles that are VERY straight forward. Think newspaper headlines. I think they’re really cracking down on click-baity titles.
• Instructional or how-to type posts are boosted for me more easily than essays. It’s entirely possible this is because I’m most comfortable teaching and that’s my sweet spot.
• Not all of my how-to posts were boosted. One called How to Edit for Show V. Tell was, but another called How to Edit for Point of View was not.
• A few times I’ve sent the link to a post to my email list, to give me a little boost in reads early on. I’m still trying to decide if that matters. I’ve sent one post out to my email list that hadn’t been boosted — and it was within half an hour. I’ve sent out another and it still hasn’t been boosted. A big problem is that I can’t tell if my post has been looked at and passed for boosting, or if no one has seen my post at all. If it’s been passed, I wouldn’t expect it to be boosted later.
• When I wrote a post that was very outside the norm for me (it was about how I’m going to process a bumper crop of bell peppers,) it was not only not boosted, but it has fewer than 50 reads. I have 40,000 followers and nearly 3000 email subscribers on Medium. It’s not being shown to readers very well at all. I’m not sure whether to take that as Medium wants me to stay in my lane or what.

Write well, edit well, dig deep.

I think that’s really the only formula. And even if you follow it, you may or may not get the extra boost from Medium. In the end, you’ll have good content , though. Whether you’re boosted or not. If it’s not doing what you want it to do on Medium, you can do other things with it.

Blogging has been fun in the last couple of weeks in a way that it hasn’t been in years for me. Being able to see that if I put in more work, I’ll get rewarded with readers and a paycheck is nice.

I wish Medium was a little more transparent.

I also wish they would give us some agency over how our posts are shared with our followers. I remember years ago, you used to be able to email a link to a post in and ask Medium to take a look for curation. That was nice. It made me feel like there was at least some recourse if my post fell between the cracks.

That would probably take too much manpower now. But it sure would be nice if we could know whether a post was passed over for boosting, and why. Or if there was some trigger in our stats that would send a post to be reviewed or re-reviewed for boosting.

You know — like if a post has a certain number of fans or reads or something, it gets flagged. That actually might be the case, but we’ll never know. Medium is definitely trying to keep readers from gaming the system.

The changes Medium has made in August 2023 to the Partnership Program seem to be very good, if you’re boosted. I’m still up in the air over how, or even whether, non-boosted posts are impacted. Time will tell.

What makes me the happiest is that I can see a clear path between working to create good content on Medium and being paid for that content. Medium is still not exceptionally transparent (and probably never will be.) But maybe they’re getting better at it.

My overall advice continues to be that Medium is a great place to blog, but it’s not reliable enough to be your sole or main income stream. There is just no way of knowing when the next change will come and how that will affect you.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to take each of the Boost guidelines and dig into them in a series of posts. Make sure to follow me if you don’t want to miss those. If you give Medium permission to let me email you, you’ll get them right in your inbox.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, Louie Baloo the dog, and Ollie Wilbur the cat. She’s on Instagram @ninjawritershop and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.

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