My earnings got completely destroyed by the new Medium Partner Program (what I'm doing next)
I have to admit I’m not great with uncertainty.
It’s been a rough week waiting to see how changes to the Medium Partner Program would affect my earnings and, thus, my future on this platform.
As you guys know, nobody’s been a bigger advocate for this site.
I mean, I have basically an entire YouTube channel dedicated to it.
I have repeated ad nauseam that there’s no better platform out there for part-time creators to start building a legitimate side income.
And I really embraced it.
I published my first article almost exactly a year ago, on August 23, 2022.
Since then, I’ve published about 245 more.
Massive drop
This isn’t short-form “how to make money on the Medium Partner Program” trash, either.
My articles average about 1,000 words per and 3 minutes of read time each.
I’ve poured my heart out writing deeply personal stories — mostly about my recovery from alcohol addiction and how my life has evolved since.
And those resonated with you!
I quickly became a top creator on this platform, based on what I’ve seen from others’ results.
I honestly believed that there was a chance that these Medium Partner Program changes would be good for writers like me, people who show up on this site every day and publish stuff that people actually want to read.
Why do I say a chance?
Because you just never, ever know.
What did I wake up to on the first morning?
About a 72% drop in earnings.
What I think happened
If you read this post about the new changes, Medium wanted to incentivize original, high-quality personal stories.
Like I said, that’s primarily what I write, and the previous pay structure rewarded that. If I touch on pop culture and big names, I try to weave my personal experiences into the work.
Medium also wanted to disincentivize clickbait, AI content, etc.
I think that’s an admirable goal.
The proliferation of AI garbage here was getting out of hand and something needed to be done.
However, it appears to me after a couple of days that the changes they’ve made may actually have the opposite effect in terms of article quality.
By shifting to a read ratio model, I think Medium may actually disincentive longer writing and ENCOURAGE the kind of stuff they’re trying to get rid of.
In fact, in the post I linked to above, they flat-out admit that short-form content will benefit.
Some of my more popular articles do have a lower read ratio, but the people who do read them usually read them for a long time.
But because it’s 2023, a lot of people have short attention spans and are less likely to get through a 1,000-word piece.
I absolutely love the new requirement that you have to be a paying member to be in the partner program.
Honestly, I think that would have achieved the goal of reducing junk content without the ratio changes.
After doing a deep dive into my stats, I do believe I’ve located a few issues that are affecting me directly.
Problem 1: long CTAs
I spent much of the first day going through almost all of my articles and deleting my calls to action — that is: linking to my other stories, linking to the now-defunct reader referral program, etc.
I’m sure by this point people were just looking at those as a signal the article was almost over and were clicking off, thus hitting my read ratio hard.
Problem 2: long-form writing
I’ve also reconsidered how long I should be writing.
As I mentioned up top, people have short attention spans nowadays.
Yes, the people who stayed with my articles really like them — typically my read times are around 3 minutes per article, which I would guess is high for this site — but the hit to my ratio from people leaving early is now prohibitive.
You may have noticed over the past couple of days that I’m writing a lot shorter.
That’s no accident.
I’m also taking a different approach to content planning.
I had a 1,300-word piece ready to go, but I’ve since gone in and broken it into three separate articles.
We’ll see if that makes a difference.
Problem 3: back catalogs might be dead
In the early going here, it appears that read time from past hits has become almost worthless.
I’ll admit it: this one is tough to swallow. And I’ve only been writing for 11 months!
There are much bigger names than me who’ve been building back catalogs for years.
I worry about them today.
Here’s what one writer posted on CEO Tony Stubblebine’s update on the first day of the partner program:
Although early indications suggest newly published stories could keep pace with previous numbers (and a couple newer writers to the platform say they’ve been largely unaffected), I do worry that they’ll taper down more quickly than in the past.
For example, I have a story from two weeks ago that is still pulling in hundreds of views and hours of read time per day and earning almost nothing.
To be continued on that front.
Promoting Medium
Look, it’s hard not to be disappointed, especially given how much I’ve promoted this place.
I brought in 30 referred members in less than a year and I’ve heard from countless others in my comments about how they arrived here after watching one of my YouTube videos.
If these new numbers really are here to stay, Medium’s new Revenue Per Mille (RPM) for longer-form writers like myself is now about the same as YouTube’s.
The advantage of Medium is that, while views are naturally lower because it’s a paywalled site, it used to pay people a relatively high RPM as a result.
But if Medium has limited potential for views and pays the same as open platforms that get way more views like YouTube, it might lead some top-tier creators to drift toward other platforms.
Now I’m cognizant that this is only DAY 10.
I don’t want to freak out, and from what I can tell, it may be that earnings will be comparable to the before times as we move through the month of August.
That said, I’m not sure how that will happen unless Medium reverses course on rug-pulling read-time earnings for back catalog stories, but I’m hopeful that common sense will prevail there.
The end of Medium as we know it?
Based on other top writers sharing their earnings, I made an income on par with the top, top writers there.
If they’ve been smoked as hard as I have been over the past couple of days, I imagine they’re reconsidering how they spend their time.
Maybe it’s just a first-week glitch, and I really do hope that’s the case.
I’m going to keep a close eye on things over the coming weeks and maybe it’ll get back to something approaching normal.
But if this is the future, I do worry a bit that it’s a bleak one for Medium.
And that makes me really, really sad.
Again, I’m willing to keep an open mind and reassess in a couple of weeks.
One door closes
It’s time to move on, however.
Am I annoyed that the site might have just annihilated my back catalog?
Yeah! Of course!
But I can’t cry about that any more than I can cry about my boss making people return to the office.
They own the platform and can do whatever they want with it, just like your employer pays you to do things.
I always knew that, as amazing as Medium is/was, it could all come to an end at any point.
At the end of the day, even if you’re an independent creator, you’re at the mercy of the people who run your platform.
I’ve also paid close attention to Tim Denning’s constant exhortations not to live or die by one platform. The absolutely fantastic book The Millionaire Fastlane also warns about this.
It’s why I worked so hard to get my YouTube channel monetized, which actually happened for me last week (yay!).
It’s why I dabbled in starting my own websites and launched several Substack newsletters.
It’s why I just published my first printed book on KDP last month and why I’m starting my own creative services business in my hometown.
So yes, I’m really disappointed.
But that ends now.
What’s next?
I’ll be straight-up honest with you guys here: after I opened my Medium Partner Program earnings the first morning and discovered a face-melting 70% decline, I barfed out a lot of thoughts into a 1,000-word rage fit of an article.
Yet if you’ve followed me here for any amount of time, you know I’ve undergone a very significant personal transformation over the past year.
There was a time I would have had a temper tantrum about this kind of thing and just quit.
I have some ideas about how to tweak my writing to comply with this new structure, and I’ll spend the next month experimenting with that.
Adapt or die, right?
After that, I’ll recalibrate and see whether it’s worth it to continue here.
At the very least, this is all a good reminder that all we have is today — go get it!
I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this in the comments and how this has affected you. Maybe I’m just an unlucky case and it’s great!
Oh, and thank you so, so much for your continued support to this point. I appreciate each and every one of you! More to come!
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1k_0PYxesTxiD_QmjPp6w
Substack:
I’m somewhat confused. Are you reposting this from Medium or are you talking about Substack?