I think I figured out Medium's earnings glitch (possible fix)
Like thousands of other writers, I’ve spent the past month digging around Medium.com for clues as to why my earnings suddenly got annihilated in January.
Sure, my pay had been on a downslope for a year, with my RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) dropping steadily from $30 at the start of the year to around $20 in the fall to about $16 in December.
But January was a whole new can of worms.
Early in the month, I had days that were doing $8 in RPM, which is far worse than I earn on the open platform YouTube.
I seriously thought about quitting and wrote this post about how I planned to pivot away from Medium in 2025.
Then, on January 9, Medium VP Scott Lamb published this post announcing that some Partner Program accounts had been suspended and that the site was tweaking its algorithm to better reward human writing.
What followed was PANDEMONIUM.
Over the next week, more than 1,300 people flooded the comment section of that post asking why they were suddenly earning pennies (or nothing) for stories that would have earned dollars the month before.
Nothing changed for a few days, but then things started to move.
Older stories - that is, ones published before January 2025 - started to earn what they used to.
My RPM went from sub-$10, back to $20, and all the way up to $33 (!) yesterday.
And yet, my January stories were still earning almost nothing.
But yesterday I noticed something weird and decided to try an experiment on those duds.
If it worked, I felt pretty confident that I’d have a beat on what was causing the glitch.
Well, this morning, I woke up to find my January stories rising from the dead.
What was the cause of this earnings spike?
Was my experiment successful?
Let’s talk about that now.