Revealing my new approach to Medium (with a heavy heart)

Things are going to change around here

In 2021, Medium ran a writers bonus program for a few months where it issued payouts to top writers. These payments were tiered, with the top one being $500.

I received the top bonus every single month for the duration of the program.

I never took it for granted and it always felt utterly wonderful when I saw that additional number appear against my regular Partner Program earnings. Those bonuses were unexpected and hugely appreciated, but they also reassured me that Medium really cared about its writers and the quality of the content being produced.

How things change. Over the last few months, my audience on Medium has gradually been pulled away, engagement has dropped to practically zero, and, overnight, my earnings have been slashed. I suddenly feel like an outcast and as though my writing is no longer good enough for Medium.

I’ve had a number of discussions with the Medium CEO, Tony Stubblebine, over the last couple of weeks which have been both enlightening and rather disincentivising as a Medium writer. It’s not his fault at all, and he has a horrible job on his hands, but I have come to a startling conclusion about a platform that I once valued so highly and spent an inordinate amount of time recommending.

I used to write five times per week on Medium, focusing almost solely on Apple content. This delivered, consistently, over $2,000 per month in Partner Program revenue and enabled me to build an audience of over 18,000 followers, nearly 300 email subscribers, and almost 100 referred members for Medium itself. Off the back of this, I’ve written a successful eBook and launched an academy for aspiring Medium writers.

After the changes Medium has made to its approach to content delivery and Partner Program payouts, I’ll be lucky if I hit $500 per month and my audience growth has slowed to a crawl.

As a content business owner, investing my and my team’s time in Medium no longer makes sense. So, I’m pulling back. I’m going to write less on Medium and conduct some experiments with the content I’m publishing. But it has fallen to the bottom of the table in terms of priorities within my business and I will only devote time to it for so long.

Since making my feelings known about the changes, I’ve had two stories ‘boosted’ (a ludicrously over-engineered, highly subjective, human-led curation method Medium uses to place stories in front of a larger audience). Those two stories have significantly increased my rolling 28-day views (by around 10,000) and earnings. Put simply, if I have four or five stories boosted each month, my earnings will probably be at the level they were before, if not higher.

Why am I moaning, then? What’s the matter with me? What’s with all the ‘woe is me’ crap, Mark?

I’m under no illusion about how hard Medium’s task is. It has investors, a subscriber base which appears to be on the verge of vanishing, and an unfathomable number of niches, writers, and readers to satisfy. I wouldn’t want that job.

Unfortunately, I just fundamentally disagree with Medium’s approach to delivering content. For me, an algorithmic system which removes human error, inconsistency, and subjectivity works. This is what YouTube does, and it delivers the right content at the right time to the right people. Sometimes it gets it wrong - but it learns, and, most importantly, it’s predictable.

When I questioned Tony about this, he explained that the YouTube approach doesn’t work for Medium. "For 12 months we lost subscribers and the better we got at recommending stories people wanted to read the more subscribers we lost,” he said.

Please read that sentence a few times. I had to. And I still don’t understand it.

Medium now feels like a lottery for tech writers. You might get a story boosted. But you might not. And, even if you do, you’ll never know why - because, for all the let’s-gather-around-the-campfire-and-sing-songs mentality of the Boost program, Medium doesn’t bother to tell you what you got right. It’s like being invited on a night out with the cool kids only to have the door slammed shut the next time a gathering occurs.

The boosting rules keep changing behind the scenes, too (trust me - I’m a part of the boost nominator program myself and even we don’t receive feedback on stories that don’t get boosted).

This is evident in the complete lack of consistency in the types of stories Medium boosts - and I speak from experience; I cannot work out why certain stories of mine are boosted and why others are not. On YouTube, it’s usually pretty obvious what you got right (or wrong).

It’s a mess, I’m afraid.

Maybe it’ll all come good. Perhaps, after a couple of months, I’ll find some consistency with boosted stories.

But, equally, maybe I won’t.

It’s for this reason that I’m changing my approach to Medium. I’ll be writing less, playing with headlines and the content itself, and keeping an incredibly close eye on the time I’m spending writing for it. I’ll also no longer be recommending it as a platform for aspiring tech writers, because it really isn’t worth their time any more (this saddens me greatly - there is a very passionate and engaged tech audience on Medium, but it is barely accessible now and I suspect it will soon head elsewhere).

The good news is that this gives me more time to invest in platforms that take the right approach to content delivery and audience satisfaction. Substack is one of those platforms and I’m delighted to say that it means you guys will have even more time invested in the content that pops into your inbox each week.

Every cloud, eh?