My Thoughts On The Medium Day Keynote Speech

Little update on what's happening at Medium if you write there

It’s a warm August day and I’m sitting at my computer with the windows closed because of smoke from the wildfires burning this country back to dinosaurs or god or I don’t even know. They’re so bad. Two days ago smoke from the wildfires in Canada reached Europe, go to the weather channel and the forecast for today is smoke.

Yesterday I popped in to catch up in the Slack group for Medium Boost nominators, and the smoke started rolling in just as I was reading a post by an editor talking about the struggles with boost nominations lately. Seemed strangely fitting.

If you write on Medium, maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t but every boost nominator I’ve talked to said it’s been real hard to get posts accepted for a boost the last couple of months. Some nominators are getting half their nominations declined. I don’t know why. All I know is that most of the time, experience tells me eventually the winds shift and the smoke clears. At least so far, knock on wood.

Last Saturday was Medium Day so I logged in to listen to Tony’s keynote, curious to see if I’d learn anything that explains what’s going on. You can read the speech here or watch it on YouTube here if you prefer.

I’m not going to recap the entire speech even though it was pretty short. Yes, we all like that there aren’t ads blinking all over Medium, or at least I think most of us do. Yes, we know Medium is striving to give exposure to quality writing, whatever that means because it’s a very subjective term to begin with.

First thing that struck me is that Medium recently opened up to 77 more countries. The total number of supported countries is now 119. Which means the number of countries before the expansion was 42. Strikes me if you jump from 42 countries to 119 countries literally overnight, competition can’t help but get stiffer.

Next thing that stood out was this. 9,661 writers have upgraded their membership to the “Friends of Medium” payment tier. If you don’t know what that tier gives you, the answer is nothing. It is literally just the ability to pay writers more. I upgraded to that tier the first day it was announced because as an editor I want to pay my writers more when I read their stories. When a “friend of Medium” reads a piece on Medium, the writer gets paid 4x more than when a $5/month member reads.

Less than 1% of members. That’s how many upgraded. Over a million members, and not even 10K people upgraded and I find that interesting. Struck me as ironic that we all want to get paid better as writers, but we seem less willing to pay another writer better. Which is neither here nor there, just an observation worth pondering.

The last takeaway I want to touch on is something Tony mentioned but didn’t elaborate on. He said “every single publication on Medium will have more power to boost stories to their own audience.”

To me, that reads as a publication level boost. I think there’s really good potential in that idea and honestly, I hope they get it right and here’s what I mean by that.

I have been a boost nominator almost from the beginning. Signed my contract in March 2023. And I’ll be the first to say the boost nomination pilot program has been one of the smartest things Medium has done in a very long time not because they get it right all the time because they don’t. But because it favors human selection over algorithms that always eventually skew to clickbait.

But. That said? I have seen pieces get boosted and fall flat. And I want to explain to you a little of the procedure, because who knows, maybe it will help. As an editor, when pieces come into my publications I have to choose which to nominate.

When I nominate a post, I need to write a pitch. Tell the curators why I think *this* particular piece deserves a boost.

Little side note on that. We’ve been told the pitch is crucial. Because curators get bombed with submissions and that pitch is our opportunity, as an editor, to say here’s why you should have a good look at this one. And it makes me wonder, if writers had to write pitches for their own submissions, if it would affect what they submit to publications. If they’d stop, give it one more read.

Anyway, if the curators agree, what happens next is they start pushing the piece out to readers who don’t know the writer. That’s what expanded reach means. If response is good, they keep pushing. When it falls flat, when response is poor, they stop. I’ve seen boosted stories get thousands or tens of thousands of views—and I’ve seen them frozen at 500 views. Sorry, that’s all she gets.

A publication level boost would start by distributing to people who follow the publication, which can only enhance response rates because people who follow a publication are interested in reading that type of piece. And yes, there will be some push and pull between big and small publications but worth remembering that small publications are often more engaged and responsive than big ones.

It feels like this could be the fresh air that blows away some of the smoke. And I don’t know. Anything we humans do can be done well or poorly and only time will tell because I don’t have a crystal ball. But I know I’m going to be revamping my publications and tightening up submission guides in preparation.

If you write on Medium, I’d love to know what you think.

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, I also write on Medium. I just published Me and Sylvia, a piece that talks about the heartbreaking secrets of a writer who left us too soon.

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