You need to read this — Medium efforts to protect and improve Monetization

Learn about the new Medium policy changes and how it affects you!

If you haven’t been affected by changes to your Medium Readership, you are either a saint or don’t check your stats!

Either way, you must understand what changes are coming to Medium and how this affects you.

Let’s first understand what the problem was a few weeks ago.

Purge of Medium Writers and Bots

Starting 6-Mar-2024, a lot of popular accounts went missing on Medium. We all speculated that bad actors potentially targeted several good writers. Read about it here:

The drop was quite significant to many, including myself:

Medium’s acknowledgment of Purge

We discovered from Writers Restored that this was an effort to purge bad actors, AI accounts, and more:

The effort was noble and effectively removed many bad accounts — however, it caught many good writers in the process.

The Result: Many users, including myself, have seen reduced Reads and Earnings in the past 3 weeks. This is much different from the trend in the previous months, and for the same actions we have been doing.

Medium’s Update on Efforts and Revised Terms

Buster Benson has published this solid summary of the efforts they did over the past few weeks:

Terry Schweitzer (Director of Content Curation, Medium) has also published a note on efforts to weed out AI content.

Recommendations on what you should do

Here’s a list of learnings I have compiled from these resources:

1. Do NOT produce AI-generated content (even the process of tweaking ChatGPT-produced content can be determined)
2. Do NOT engage in follow-on-follow efforts — your comments asking people to return favors could be flagged and put you under a shadow ban.
3. Do NOT solicit engagement efforts from other platforms; it is easy to trace where you land for an article and may result in a ban.
4. DO report and block spam/impersonating accounts — do this even for people who randomly keep clapping on your articles without genuine engagement.
5. DO only genuine engagement — read fully, highlight, and comment. Do this for a diverse set of accounts — if there is a pattern between them, it may be flagged.

THANK YOU!