Medium’s Continued Downfall
Section from Medium’s Newsletter
A change is coming to the way we approach stories in the Partner Program about Medium, what we often call meta stories. Those kinds of stories are already something we try to keep out of your feeds as a reader unless you’ve specifically asked to follow them. The goal of the Medium Partner Program is to deliver value to readers and writers, and we often hear from our members that these kinds of stories aren’t the ones they want to read, much less pay for. You’re free to write meta stories, we just don’t want Partner Program funds going to them. Payments seem to incentivize extra navel gazing and unwanted get-rich-quick culture. In March, we will start notifying writers when we see their meta stories behind the paywall, and then begin removing them.
Since Tony Stubblebine took over as CEO from Medium, the changes that keep happening on the platform have made it worse and worse for writers. For some maybe not, but for many, including myself, it sucks.
I understand needing to save money and to try and make a company profitable. Removing the Medium-funded publications made sense, even if it meant that people seeing my writing on some of the popular publications would go away.
But the continued push of giving less and less to writes who want to publish stories behind the paywall is just disappointing. I get wanting to make sure real and good writers are being seen the most but using boosts and human curation of what stories people see has made Medium worse — not only for writers but reader too.
It’s not all about the money. There was a time during COVID, when I was writing a lot more, Medium paid well for views and reads. I was making easily a couple of hundred dollars a month by just doing something I love.
The biggest issue isn’t that my stories make barely any money now, it is things like the quote I shared above from Mediums newsletter sent this morning. It is no longer about what you write and how popular it may be on the platform, it is what Medium wants to be seen and what they want to pay writers to write about.
It isn’t censorship but it does feel icky that Medium doesn’t want people to put criticisms of Medium behind a paywall — because for the most part when people are writing about the Partner Program on Medium it is how bad the company is doing with it.
I will still post there, but I have already moved my custom domain off and I post to my own website on Ghost or here first. It’s just too bad that Medium is no longer focused on all writers but specific ones which continues to push people out.