Is Medium on the Verge of Shutting Down?
Here's the most likely cause of your recent earnings cuts if you're a Medium writer
Note: This originally appeared on Medium on November 4, 2023. I am reposting it now with a few changes (mostly through footnotes) because, since that time, there has been an ongoing outcry of surprise over earnings on that platform. But, as this article points out, the way Medium calculates earnings is so obfuscated that someone is likely to always be furious about an earnings drop whenever Medium adjusts its earnings algorithm.
Before I became a feudal serf earning about twenty cents per hour on the Medium platform, I was a software engineer for nearly two decades.
So I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen the signs of a sinking tech company.
The first step towards a tech startup’s shutdown is layoffs
Here is how the tech industry operates.
A new company starts with a bang. Lots of great press. They overhire and staff up with dozens of engineers. They install pool tables and foosball in the break room, offer hot yoga in Auditorium C, hold all-staff meetings with excited CEOs who promise a gilded age, and arrange for people on gold-plated scooters to deliver your lunch.
TechCrunch pumps them up. Investors fawn. They overhire some more. Soon, they become the most delicious tech company this side of GrubHub. They move from their dingy headquarters in San Francisco’s South of Market (aka SOMA) to a more prestigious address.
Then, reality hits. They realize that they never really developed a viable plan for making money. Accountants are rare in Silicon Valley, I guess, because nobody told the founders that acquiring a few million users at five dollars a pop would pretty much only pay for foosball tournaments and yoga classes.
Things are expensive these days, but running a profitable business has always been hard. Especially in the tech business, where the most successful startups get bought out by giant companies, and the startup’s founders get hired by the acquiring company for salaries that would make a pro basketball player jealous.
The big company folds the newer one into its business and, usually, scraps the original product. The founders stay on board for a couple of years and collect gobs of equity and cash, then move on to another startup.
It’s all a big game of Monopoly.
But sometimes, the startup grinds it out for a few years instead of selling, determined to maintain its independence and its model because the founders believe in it. They don’t want to end up part of another company’s scrap heap.
The intrepid young company perseveres for a while, but warning lights begin to flash. Revenue goals aren’t met. The tech news writeups become filled with snark.
Finally, a new CEO enters the scene. Tears everything up. Buys a house in Pacific Heights. Steals someone’s high school sweetheart. Lays off a few hundred or few thousand employees with a well-crafted all-staff holiday email:
We believe that these improved staff deployments will help us, and you, grow and prosper as we navigate these challenges to our current business model. We will be rededicating ourselves to renewal and growth. Happy holidays! A security team will see you out the door.
Sad employees are seen leaving the building carrying boxes filled with plants and books and framed pictures. Wednesday morning bagels are replaced with vending machines. The bathrooms become a little less pristine.
Two months later, the company announces that it is shutting down.
Sadly, your recent earnings cutbacks are Medium’s equivalent to layoffs.
It looks like a shutdown is looming. Don’t yell at me. I’m just the messenger. But also, don’t be surprised to discover that medium.com no longer resolves to a DNS address one morning while you’re logging on. Or worse, points to something called X.
Just how bad is it at Medium?
It’s bad. Hundreds, maybe thousands of writers have left during the last two years or so because their earnings have become a ghost of what they once were. I can give you some specifics in my case.1
According to an official Medium post,2 these stats are the ones that count when it comes to Medium’s earning calculus:
Specifically, the post states:
Your list of stories are sortable by claps, responses, and lifetime earnings. This will let you quickly identify stories that have had the most engagement. Claps and responses are two of the signals that factor into our new Partner Program earnings calculations.
I don’t really know if that’s accurate. I’ve read other things. Frankly, I don’t care. All I know is that I no longer earn anything close to what I did a year ago on a high-view story.
I’ve isolated two specific stories, one from September 30, 2022:
No matter how you think about the numbers presented, aside from views, the “Florida is Dying” numbers are better. The read ratio is much better. The number of claps is significantly higher. It was also dropped into numerous reading lists (thank you, everybody!). The Trump article wasn’t dropped into a single one.
The number of views on the Florida story is lower, but that’s an algorithmic thing. Not my fault. Those who found the story stayed and read the whole thing. It has 300 more full reads than the older story. But pays a whole lot less.
The story is better, too. The first story is just another story about Trump. There are thousands of these on Medium.3 And let’s face it. He’s an easy target. But “Florida is Dying” was better researched and took a deep dive into the ugly morass that is now Florida under Ron Desantis.4
If the Trump story was distributed (I can’t remember if it was), that may have impacted the dollar total. But if that’s the difference maker, Medium needs to re-evaluate financial compensation based on Boosts, which are the rough equivalent of the former “Chosen for Distribution” boost method and are useful for generating views but really (in my opinion) shouldn’t alone trigger a mad bonus.5
For what it’s worth, “Florida is Dying” was not boosted, but it still got a ton of views, partly because it got dropped into so many reading lists and found a slightly viral home on Twitter. Stories of mine that have been boosted have earned considerably less than stories that were distributed under the old system.6
In January 2022, one of my Medium stories7 earned $1,571. It had 4.6k claps and 90 responses. Fewer, again, than “Florida is Dying.” But a much better earner.
Explanations
I’ve heard and read multiple explanations for this fiasco. Multiple explanations without clarity are the kind of things that happen when a company obfuscates everything. I’m pretty sure I even saw Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine (aka Coach Tony) claim that Medium overpaid authors in prior months, which in my mind is a despicable comment.
That $1325 I earned for the Trump piece? That’s not an overpayment. It came in the middle of many less lucrative stories. I doubt I’ve come close to making minimum wage as a Medium writer.8 Getting a nice payout seemed fair to me. I was happy.
Honestly, I didn’t come to Medium to make money. I came to Medium to rant and express myself, and maybe drop in a few pieces of fiction. But there’s a principle here of basic human decency that Medium isn’t following. Slashing writer earnings is disrespectful. Their excuses for it are dishonest.9
As a result of these policies, very good writers are jumping ship and starting Substacks or finding other ways to make money.
My explanation is that Medium is doing everything it can to avoid shutting down the shop, and is now resorting to slashing writers’ pay. It is their equivalent to layoffs. Their recent adjustments made after the recent outcry over September earnings resulted in a seven dollar “bonus” for me. It was a meaningless, cynical attempt to cover up a massive pay cut.
Others have discussed this laugh of a “bonus,” so I won’t add anything more.10
To Medium’s credit, they appear genuinely committed to the platform and the idea of improved discourse. But the writers are the platform’s engine, and the engine is getting treated with sludge in its oil.11
This looks like a company on its last legs to me, unless it gets saved by an angel investor or changes are made.
Are there solutions?
There are things Medium can try in their effort to stay afloat that don’t hammer writer earnings.
I don’t work for Medium, so no suggestions I make will see the light of day, but I’ll throw one out there you’ll hate anyway. That four-letter word, advertising. I know. I hear you. Boo! Hiss!
But done right, with reasonably tasteful and unintrusive ads the way pubs like New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, or The Athletic handle them, it might work. Say no to Taboola (“You won’t believe what she looks like now!”), and hello to Saks Fifth Avenue (anorexic models on meth). It’s an ugly solution, but what would you rather have? A pittance for your efforts? Or some real cash?
Of course, given Medium’s history of how it treats its writers, there’s as good a chance as any that they’ll set up an ad program but still cut writer earnings again. Coach Tony will get his payout no matter what.
This brings me to the other, more obvious solution if you’re a writer. You’ve heard it before. There are thousands of articles that cover it, so I won’t make this a how-to story.
Expand. Don’t be dependent on Medium. Get a Substack, start your own newsletter, find another platform, or do it the old-fashioned way and hunt for freelance writing opportunities—anything to eliminate the dependency on the Medium earnings sword.
This is especially true given that, in my experience within the tech industry, these earnings cuts are the sign of a company on the verge of collapse.
Notes
The other number one rule of writing, even if you’re a long-time journalist who is landing at Substack (many here won’t read you because you’re from mainstream media, and Substack is considered by many as an escape from mainstream media), is don’t depend on writing to earn your keep.
I don’t really know that I picked out the best examples of my own earnings cuts. I could have chosen dozens of examples. Overall, earnings from my high-engagement stories are a fraction of what they were a year ago.
Footnotes
Caveat: This was written well over a year ago. People are still complaining about the payment algorithm, but the specifics of these complaints may now be different. The algorithm is mysterious, strange, and impenetrable to anyone outside of Medium’s development staff.
It’s worth noting that on Substack, Trump is a cottage industry. If he were to disappear in the middle of the night, three-quarters of us would starve.
“Florida Is Dying” also did well on Substack. I reproduced the story here as one of my first articles and it generated enough interest to convince me that Substack was a better “medium” (apologies) for getting eyeballs. You can find the Substack version of it here:
For those of you unfamiliar with “Chosen for Distribution:” It was another heavily obfuscated process of curation by unknown Medium staffers who somewhat arbitrarily decided which pieces they wanted to promote. Stories chosen for distribution did substantially better than those that didn’t. Boosts are essentially the same thing, except Boosts come from a pool of nominations that typically come from Medium publication editors. This adds a deceptive tinge of democracy to the process, but at the end of the day, the curation is still handled by a small group of unidentified people wearing hoodies and face scarves whose decision-making process is questionable on a good day, and quite political on a not-so-good day. In other words, with Boost, it is almost a requirement that you either brown nose people you think might have an influence getting you a Boost, or find out which cliques to belong to in an attempt to race to the top of the earnings heap.
One exception: A story about ageism in the workplace keeps chugging along at about $100 per month.
I haven’t at Substack, either, but I don’t use a paywall to block stories. Everything is free (with unusual potential exceptions for novels in progress). Substack doesn’t obfuscate. I’m in control of my earnings potential.
One can make the argument that writers should know better: It’s not a good way to make money generally. That’s a larger conversation, but Medium sells itself to writers as a place to make money. Therefore, the argument doesn’t apply, anyway.
One other item of contention worth mentioning is that Medium encourages the development of “Publications” to drive traffic. Publication editors earn nothing extra for this effort. It is truly a form of corporate freeloading.
It killed me not to be able to highlight from the hot yoga down to the anorexic models on meth. 🤣
I’m perfectly fine with Medium’s implosion at this point. Some days I’d rather go bobbing for apples in a bowl of hypodermic needles than open the app.