Wow, what a mess at Medium

Is it just me?

Happy Friday

I haven’t been at Medium much this week. Sometimes life and work get out of hand. Popped in today looking forward to a catchup and wow, what a mess.

The entire homepage was filled with meta posts talking about the changes at Medium. Is it just me, or are you seeing an explosion of meta posts, too?

The affiliate program posts were funniest. Also, dumbest

Apparently, it works like this. If you (or I) can get non-members to pony up the $5/month to join, we get half their member fees for one year.

So, $2.50 per month or $30 for the year. Per referral. Which is — whatever. If you have a big list somewhere else (Twitter, email) maybe you make a few grand. That’s not going to be most people.

The posts about it? Too funny. Someone suggested that everyone should be using affiliate links in their posts now. You know. The posts behind the paywall. That non-members can’t read. lol.

Someone else wrote an entire post telling people why they should sign up. It’s behind the paywall. So only members can read it. lol

Dumb and dumber.

Not everyone gets paid to write anymore…

All existing partner program members will get paid for their writing until the end of the year. At the end of the year, only people who have 100+ followers will be eligible to earn through the partner program.

The “theory” is that if they’re only paying writers who have 100+ followers, then there will be fewer people to pay and more of those member dollars will go towards the writers who do have over 100 readers.

I think it’s going to backfire.

I think a lot of “new” writers aren’t going to pay the member fee. The free membership allows them to write... they just can’t read more than 3 stories.

My guess is that it’s going to be off-putting to new writers. If they can’t earn their membership back, where’s the incentive? They won’t want to pony up for a membership until they have 100 followers.

The change they probably should have made…

Seems contrary (to me) to say they want new members, but then to tell those new members that they won’t get paid to write until they gain 100 followers.

I think if they want new members who come there for the stellar writing, a more effective change might have been to say all writers can join the partner program, but meta posts don’t qualify for payment.

It would be so easy to automate, too. If the word “Medium” is in the post, it gets flagged for manual review.

The quality of content would go up dramatically.
It would have to.

Incidentally, I cleaned up my homepage instantly.

I muted 2 publications. Two. They’re publications that cater to newbies and are filled with meta posts. Muted them both and poof - cleaned up the homepage instantly.

Mark my words, those two pubs (and others like them) are going to be where new writers congregate to get their first 100 readers. Probably by talking about how hard it is to get their first 100 readers. lol.

People will play the follow game again, too.

There’s some guy on Fiverr selling views to Medium posts.
That’s probably going to get more common, too.

It’s going to be a mess for a while.

I’m not sure that’s going to help them attract new readers, but I guess we’ll see.

What do you think?

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P.S. Apparently Quora is jumping into the game and paying writers, too. Not for asking questions (as they did in the past) but for answering them. I’ve heard the pay rate is great, but I have not looked into it at all — if you write there, how’s it going?

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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

xo,
Linda