How Medium surrendered to Substack (time to fight back)
So, I lost another referred member on Medium last week.
If you joined the site after August of 2023, you may not know what that means.
Prior to changes to the Medium Partner Program at that juncture, Medium had a referral system that shared about half of the subscriber revenue for every paying member you brought to the site.
As someone who directed a lot of external eyeballs here via my YouTube channel (much in the same way that Zulie Rane did with hers … her referred members bring in hundreds a month), this was an awesome feature and one that highly incentivized people to help build Medium’s subscriber base.
To this day, my comment section is constantly peppered with “I found you here thanks to your YouTube channel!” comments.
I have no doubt I would have at least doubled my numbers by this point, what with my YouTube channel recently passing through 2,000 subs and generating 10,000+ views in a month for the first time.
But alas, the awesome program is no more.
Today I want to talk about how Medium waved the white flag to Substack when it killed the referral program, and how it can get back in the paid subscriber fight.
