Jack Preston King
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Here’s my understanding of how the partner program algorithm works.

Authors get paid once a week. During that week, there are X many paid members, so roughly 1/4 of each member’s monthly $5 membership is on the table. During that week, readers engage with locked posts by clapping and commenting. On Wednesday, the algorithm looks back at the previous Monday through Sunday and says these specific members clapped this many times for your locked stories during this specific week. It it is not a general pot of money. It’s a fixed amount based on memberships active in that exact week, and each member’s claps are distributed among specific stories they engaged with in that exact week.

So say I have $1.25 on the table this week, 1/4 of my paid membership. I give your story 50 claps. Say I don’t clap on anybody else’s stories, so I’ve allocated my whole $1.25 to you. The next day you publish another story. I clap 50 times, and for no one else. You won’t get another $1.25. Rather, my applause is split in two, because $1.25 is all I have on the table. You still get $1.25 of my membership money, but now you’ve written two stories to earn it, when you already had it in your pocket on the first one. So if you have a loyal fan base, and get a lot of claps on different articles in the same week from the same people, you’re not doing yourself any favors. You are not increasing your income.

If you write across many topics, and have different sets of loyal fans who read and clap for each topic, you would be OK, because you wouldn’t have the same people clapping for everything. I think most of us, though, get the bulk of our engagement from the same basic group of people — our followers. If that’s the case, publishing more often than once a week is almost certainly not earning more money for you.

It’s not an exact science and I’m not a Medium expert, but I think it’s important to consider the mechanics of how the partner program works when spacing/timing stories.I think you’re right that publishing too often creates reader fatigue, and you lose fans. So why do that when excessive publishing won’t earn you more money? Just food for thought…

    Jack Preston King

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    Author, poet, philosopher. JackPrestonKing.com. Facebook.com/authorjackprestonking. Twitter.com/JackPrestonKing