Giving Back: Medium’s Partner Program

I recently joined the Medium Partner Program and soon after I stumbled upon the “Gift a membership” feature in Medium. I immediately recognized a potential opportunity to give back to Medium readers. For $50, an annual Medium membership can be gifted to a reader.

As a point of reference, a recent post of mine which had decent readership earned $34.25 in its first week in the Partner Program. One week’s worth of earnings from this single post can almost fund an annual membership for a reader. My personal plan going forward is to produce more consistent, compelling content on Medium both to hopefully inspire and educate others and to fund annual membership gifts.

My goal is to gift one annual membership each week going forward. This is exciting but what would make it exponentially more impactful is if other writers (most with far greater audiences than I) joined this initiative. Together we could gift hundreds of annual memberships every single week! Medium continues earning revenue, writers broaden their audience, and readers who otherwise could not afford this membership can finally have one.

One question may be, why not just offer your content for free? I actually do offer mine for free on my personal blog but that site has far fewer potential readers than Medium and virtually zero discoverability features. Furthermore, writers put time, energy, and emotion into their posts and I feel like compensation is earned. It is certainly not free money.

Please tag your favorite writers so that we can quickly make this vision a reality. I would love to build up enough momentum that Medium takes notice and joins forces with us to formalize this program and reach as many readers as possible!
Thank you!