Medium is about to get a lot harder. (I watched the CEO's new video)
Before we talk about Medium, let’s talk about Vocal for a minute, okay? A lot of writers really kind of hate Vocal. Know why? Because it’s hard to get reads.
There’s two kinds of writers who love Vocal.
First, the people who win the writing challenges. Because, duh.
Second, people who are able to drive their own traffic and don’t need Vocal’s help to get reads. Because Vocal offers something Medium doesn’t. They pay for ALL reads. Not just members, but external reads too. Medium doesn’t pay for external reads.
So if you have a list or a big social following or you’re really good at SEO and can drive traffic to a post without the platform helping, you’ll do well at Vocal.
Hold that in the back of your mind, okay?
On December 5, Medium’s new CEO posted a post called Boosting the Boost.
He doesn’t like the term distribution. He thinks it should be called a boost. As in, good stories get a boost. He says a boost is both views and money. Like, if you have a good story, you get “boosted” which means money and views.
Question is, what makes a good story?
Well, he answered that, too. With 3 bullet points. The first two, we already knew. The third one was kind of the mic drop.
Readers have more control through “following” and “show less like this”
Plus, increased weight for following, clapping and highlighting.
And — “decreased weight for stories that have no signal.” (source)
So what the heck is a signal? Well, he explained that, too.
“Authors who promote their article through social media, through email, to their followers, and on publications are now more likely to get their article picked up for a boost.” (source, Medium)
One of the “signals” that you deserve a boost is that you drive your own views through email or social media. No signals, no boost.
Side note — All you 1-clap people, cut it out. lol. I jest, but not really. If following, claps and highlighting are how you help people get a boost, one clap doesn’t say much. It’s like your school teacher giving you 2% on an exam and saying be glad you got a score at all.
I watched the new CEO’s new video…
Two weeks ago, just before Christmas, Tony did a video interview with Sinem Gunel where they talked more about “boosting” posts.
Here’s some snippets that are important for writers to know…
First Tony explains how he grew his audience…
17:42: I was a publisher and writer here long before I joined … my own audience that I have gathered over the years … most of the traffic comes from other places like most of the traffic comes from posting to Reddit or a lot of my articles do well on Hacker News, right? And so it's, you have places you can share your article that can give you a lot of external traffic
(source: YouTube)
He goes on to say that if writers don’t have external traffic, then why should Medium give you views? Here, read for yourself…
Why should they boost you?
18:28: “The number one thing that I want to get away from is like, we were—in the interest of fairness and democratizing access to audience—we’d started trying to give distribution to articles that had zero external traffic and I actually think that—not in every case, but in a lot of cases—that's a a negative signal about the quality of the piece. Like if you wrote something that you don't have anyone in your life you want to share it with, why would we be the ones sharing it for you, right? (source: YouTube)
And expands on that…
19:36: if you write something and you don't have a single co-worker that you think would respect it, then we shouldn't be the ones promoting that and boosting that, right?
(source: YouTube)
So then Sinem asks if it’s okay to send her posts to her email list. In the video, Tony had talked about “bad faith” behavior like follow-for-follow and things people do to try game Medium. So she asked if sending to her list is “bad” or okay...
22:54: (Sinem) “I can easily drive at least a couple hundred clicks to an article as soon as it's live just by sending an email. And I could, in each email, I could tell my audience hey if you like this please, you know, clap for it, leave a comment it's going to help me reach more readers. Is that bad behavior, is that something writers should be careful about because it's overly promotional or is that something you encourage?” (source: YouTube)
So he answers to say yes, that’s what they want.
27:38 “We want you to cross promote your articles. If you're building a bot that makes it look like you're getting traffic, yeah, that's not good faith behavior. If you're sharing it to your audience, yeah that is good faith behavior.” (source: YouTube)
So, I have a question for you…
Can you get a couple hundred clicks to your newest article by sending an email?
Seriously. How’s that going to work for you?
Without quoting excessively (the video is about an hour long) Tony also encouraged writers to upload their mailing list to Medium so when you email out a story, it goes out (via Medium email) to people that follow you off Medium.
So someone like Simen, or anyone with a good sized mailing list, can upload their list to Medium. Then when you tick the little box to send your newest post by email, it will go to everyone, including the “off Medium” emails you uploaded.
Couple of thoughts I have
First of all, we don’t get paid for the external views that “boost” a post.
Second, and this is a bigger one. If I uploaded my Substack and Gumroad lists to Medium so they get my posts by email, that might not be “bad faith” behavior according to Medium, but my subscribers might not agree.
I mean, if someone signed up at Substack to read my posts here, or signed up on Gumroad to get notice of new products — are they expecting me to send email to them from Medium about my Medium posts? No, probably not.
I won’t be doing that, in case you wondered.
It makes me wonder if my following even matters? There’s a ton of work behind growing a following of 18K on Medium. Kind of disheartening to learn that my writing isn’t worthy of a “boost” unless I drive external traffic to my posts.
I do see the merit of external links. I do. BUT…
My top read story of all time has over 266K views. The bad news is that 82% of the views were external. Page 1 on Google, and went nuts on Reddit. See?
Yes, it was lovely to get all those views. But I got paid for 18% of them. And with the new “boosting” rules, I have NO doubt a story with this much external traffic would get a boost. Enough to compensate for unpaid views? I don’t know.
BUT. Here’s the thing. If a really good writer doesn’t have a list, and doesn’t have a way to drive “a couple hundred reads” the minute they hit send on an email, does that mean their story is low quality? I don’t think it does.
I think a lot of writers came to Medium specifically because they didn’t have an audience of their own. They went to Medium because there’s already readers waiting to find good stories. They saw Medium as a way to build a following.
Seems to me it used to work that way. But maybe not anymore.
I guess we’ll see.
It feels divisive.
If you happen to have a big mailing list and you don’t have any problem uploading it to Medium, this could work really well for you. Post an article and tick the box to send it by email.
Or, don’t upload your list to Medium. Just email your list every time you have a new post. People with good sized lists can probably clean up.
But for everyone else who doesn’t have a list, I wonder if Medium will become as frustrating as Vocal. I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe it will really become an issue of finding publications that can get views on their writers.
I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but it feels really divisive.
Like the people who have an audience off Medium will do well.
People who don’t — maybe not so much.
Maybe it’s time for writers to just buckle down and build their own list. Maybe that’s the big take away here. That we can’t depend on a platform anymore. Maybe we never should have depended on anyone but ourselves in the first place. I don’t know.
What do you think?
On Medium…
Foster Kids & Farming; 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Marie Antoinette
“The Woman They Could Not Silence” Is Why The Internet Makes Me Mad
Scroll down a bit and click the heart if you enjoyed this. :)
xo
Linda
As you note, people come to Medium for the social flywheel. The audience is already there. That's a huge value add compared to, say, just having a blog somewhere in the ether. That's also why so many writers are willing to pay $5/month to be there. It's an easy investment with a (potentially) huge upside--and part of that investment is the understanding that Medium will supply the traffic.
Now we have the CEO on record as saying that we will need to bring our audience to the show.
That's a lot of dissonance for writers to wrestle with.
To be clear, I appreciate Tony's "real talk." It's a refreshing change from what we had previously. But more and more, it feels like we're returning the era of gatekeeping pubs and away from the indie writer.
I don't know what this says about me, Linda, but I'm happy to get any sorts of readers any old way. Some of us might be in this game exclusively or primarily for the money, but I'm not. If I can develop a reputation for being a good writer and someone who supports other writers in their time of need, that's all I want.
To paraphrase Jesse Jackson: I may not be making a living writing, but I am somebody.