I don't think Medium wants us to publish daily
We've all heard about President Biden's little Medium problem, right? Is Medium turning down the volume on daily writers to address quality issues?
Happy Friday,
I stumbled across a post earlier this week that shocked me at first. But when I thought about it, honestly I just shook my head. It didn’t shock me anymore.
The post was by a woman I used to read in awe. Seriously.
She could crank out a post every dang day and they were mostly good reading. She wasn’t batting a hundred, but who does? Mostly, that’s subjective. She sometimes wrote stuff that didn’t interest me, but she was always mostly good reading.
At one point, she was making roughly $5K a month on Medium. On average. She’d write about it sometimes. But not all the time, so I gave her a pass.
And no, it’s not Zulie. No, I’m not naming names. It’s not about that.
Experiments with frequency…
Anyway, she said she’d had a busy week working on other projects and didn’t have time to write every day. She noticed a funny thing.
Her reads went up.
Wtf? So she started experimenting with frequency, and noticed if she writes every day, she gets less reads. Boom! It’s like they turn down the volume on her voice.
After that, I started seeing more people saying the same thing.
My first thought was that maybe they don’t like people flooding the feed. But when I thought about it, that doesn’t make sense. There are too many writers. Thousands of posts go up every hour. One person can not flood the feed. Not possible.
Then I thought about their little “quality” problem.
They know they have one.
We’ve all heard about President Biden’s little Medium problem, right?
He wanted to post on Medium, like Obama does. So he got an aide to set up an account. But the account kept getting shown smutty sex posts and low quality content that no one really wanted the president to see. Oops.
And there was no reading history to clear. Double oops. lol.
Tech people often solve problems the dumbest way…
Biden’s little Medium problem was some time ago, but the quality problem still exists. Lots of posts complaining about it, too. Thank heaven’s for the following tab, so I can toggle over to see what people I follow have published.
Occurs to me that tech people often try to “reverse engineer” stuff and that seldom goes well. In theory, it’s great. In practice, not usually.
Here’s an example.
When Google engineers noticed that top quality pages have a lot people linking to them. So they thought linking would be a great ranking factor.
lol. Hello link bundles on fiverr.
It makes me wonder if Medium is trying to “fix” the quality problem by turning down the volume on people who write daily.
And while that *might* reduce the volume of low quality posts, it will also punish the people who can produce good reading every day. I’m not sure that’s a smart move.
Not everyone can produce good reading every day. True enough. But some people can. Journalists and actual writers, for example. It’s what they do.
Frequency isn’t something I can experiment with because I’ve never been able to write daily. My work is just too crazy. About 3x per week is the most I can do.
What about you?
Have you noticed any difference in views based on how often you publish?
More reading…
P.S. If you’re reading this in email, click the title to get to the online version where you can leave comments, like on Medium.
xo,
Linda
There's another issue to consider. Given that there's so much to read and so little time, I, for once, like to distribute my reading. Meaning...I don't want to read the same author every day. My time is limited, and I like to spread my comments and my clapping to different writers I follow. I will be turned off entirely if writers I follow write every day. And that might explain why readership or earnings plummet for those who post too frequently.
I honestly don't think it's wise to publish every day. I doubt it's medium that's putting the skids on readers, it's the readers themselves. I can't think of a single person whose work I'd want to read every single day, and if I were bombarded in that way I'd bow out.
Just no!
There are no journalists who publish every day. None. No reporters and no columnists that I know of. It just isn't done, for obvious reasons--it's overkill. So why would anyone think it's a good idea to send new stuff out every day? I don't know, but I do know it's something unique to Medium. At some point the word got out that that's how you make money here and suddenly hordes of writers were trying it.
It's a terrible idea and if it works for some, it won't work forever. For those who lament their lack of success even though they're publishing every day--please just stop. Do your best work. Take your time. Send it out when it's done and not a minute before. The world will wait for you.