Webinar: How Does the Medium Partner Program Work?
The recording and transcript are now available.
Ever wondered how the Medium Partner Program works, what the payout breakdown is, or why we’ve designed it the way we did?
You can learn the answers to those questions in the replay of a webinar I hosted with Buster Benson, Principal Product Manager at Medium.
Buster broke down:
- The teams involved in orienting everyone, including Medium the business, Medium readers, and Medium writers, around quality — around stories that we think are great stories that deepen your understanding of the world.
- The incentives we use — distribution and earnings — to get writers to share their stories on Medium.
- The 77 countries we added in August 2024.
- The nitty gritty behind how payments are calculated.
If you prefer reading, I’ve edited the transcript below for readability and clarity.
∘ Q1: Can you calculate earnings per read?
∘ Q2: How is it possible for a writer to make $10,000 on a single viral article?
∘ Q3: Can earning too much money flag you to Medium?
∘ Q4: What’s best, Substack vs Medium?
∘ Q5: Will adding stories to Lists be an earnings factor?
∘ Q6: How can you determine what percentage of your readers are already paying members?
∘ Q7: Can you earn on Medium without being a Friend of Medium?
∘ Q8: Why did Medium kill the referral program?
∘ Q9: How to be more fair with the read ratio?
∘ Q10: Any incentives for new writers?
∘ Q11: How does original vs AI content impact earnings?
∘ Q12: How do you balance the payment incentives with readers who don't know to clap or leave a comment?
∘ Q13: Why does the Medium Partner Program only work with Stripe?
∘ Q14: Why do some stories with fewer reads earn more than others with more reads?
∘ Q15: Who earns more money if I as a writer become a Friend of Medium?
∘ Q16: Do writers get financially rewarded for external traffic?
∘ Q17: Do I need to enroll in the Partner Program to be sent money from Medium?
∘ Q18: How do paywalled stories get so many reads?
∘ Q19: Can I choose to let earnings accumulate before paying out?
∘ Q20: Can I change the country where I’m connected with Stripe?
∘ Q21: What is a paywalled story on Medium?
∘ Q22: When should I join the Medium Partner Program?
∘ Q23: What’s the best strategy for paywalling Medum stories?
∘ Q24: Can you paywall a story that is free to read somewhere else?
∘ Q25: Do you need to be a paying Medium Member to join the Medium Partner Program?
∘ Q26: Do we get friend links for stories behind a paywall published with a publisher?
∘ Q27: Do you need to be a Friend or Partner to be featured by Medium?
∘ Q28: Is there a limit to the number of stories you can publish behind the paywall?
∘ Q29: How many reads do you need for it to be worth putting a story behind the paywall?
∘ Q30: Is there a limit to how much you can earn from Medium?
∘ Q31: Can one person have two Medium accounts?
∘ Q32: How can I reduce the withholding tax taken by Stripe on my Medium earnings?
∘ Q33: Can you remain in the Partner Program if you’re not paying your Medium membership fee?
∘ Q34: Can I get Medium to pay me in dollars into a debit account?
∘ Q35: Do I have to renew Medium membership every month to remain in the Partner Program?
∘ Q36: Is engagement measured at the writer level or the story level?
∘ Q37: What exactly is the Boost?
∘ Q38: Can stories make thousands of dollars without being Boosted?
∘ Q39: How can you earn more money on stories?
∘ Q40: Quality or quantity?
∘ Q41: Is there a full list of publications on Medium?
∘ Q42: How do images impact story length?
∘ Q43: Do you need to be published in a publication that’s part of the Boost Nomination Program to get Boosted?
∘ Q44: Can Medium comments earn money?
∘ Q45: How can you get articles featured by Medium?
Buster: I’m going to just spend 10-15 minutes to give a very high-level overview of the Partner Program with some detail specifically around how earnings work and a little bit of detail around our motivations for having the partner program and how it’s all structured internally.
I’ll end with a note about how we design it, because if you understand a few things about how it works and why it works, I think a lot of the rest of it becomes obvious. Feel free to ask questions along the way or at the end.
I’m Buster B Benson. I am a product manager for the Partner Program and for a lot of the publishing tools at Medium — things like stats, Partner Program, Publications, the editor. All these things are part of the purview of the writer experience on Medium.
There are a couple other groups that Medium that focus on the membership side of things or the distribution side of things, but we really focus on things that make the writing experience better. Obviously, the Partner Program is a big piece of that.
I’m going to start very high level. The Partner Program is one piece of a many, of a big pie.
These things are working together to orient everyone, including Medium the business, Medium readers, and Medium writers, around quality — around stories that we think are great stories that deepen your understanding of the world. It’s our attempt to change the way that information and stories are shared on the internet in the world and orient them around the things that make us feel smarter, feel better, about things instead of just the things that get our attention the most.
The Partner Program is one piece of that. It’s about incentivizing writers.
The Boost is about taking stories that we believe should be seen by a wider audience and actually distributed them, finding them readers. There’s the Boost Nomination Program, which is a program where people in the community — publication editors for example — read a lot of stories, get submissions from people, and nominate them.
That will play a key role in the Partner Program because Boosted stories earn more per engagement from a reader.
There’s the internal curation team, which is our internal team that actually try to keep the bar consistent across different genres and subjects. They work in tandem with the Boost Nomination Program.
There’s the recommendations team, which is the team that works on the algorithms that distribute stories based on what you’ve read, what your topics you follow, what people you follow, what pubs you follow, and show you the stories.
All of this does play a piece in showing you the right story at the right time. It’s also the mechanism that we use that we do the Boost. Stories that get Boosted will get recommended a lot more to people.
And there’s Trust and Safety. I mention them because all of this is about trying to keep the quality bar high, but it also means us taking a lot of steps to remove people who are try to extract money from the system without contributing anything to it.
Those are some of the pieces that are involved.
I just wanted to share this really quickly: we have two ways as a company to encourage writers to orient around great stories and give them permission to write them and share them on Medium:
One of them is about earnings, which we’re going to talk about today, and one of them is about distribution. Distribution just means the showing of the story.
We don’t require you to be in the Partner Program to get Boosted, for example. The earning side is really the one that, if you’re motivated by the signal of earning some money for every story you write, then that’s the one that will work. But you actually get both.
We do this because we want writers to put their stories behind the paywall. If they do put them behind the paywall, then we can sell that bundle of great stories as membership to readers. Assuming that that’s a high quality bundle, then we will grow the membership. That will grow the budget for us to pay more writers. It’s a virtuous cycle.
You can imagine if we do this correctly, we want to pay writers more and more and more, and then that means we’ll get more and more members; that means we can pay writers more.
I’ll mention this just because this is part of our philosophy too: we want to include everyone in the world in this mission.
About a year ago, we opened up the Medium Partner Program to another 11 or 12 countries.
This is where it was in August last year. The green countries are where people could join the Partner Program. Last year, we added a few more small but mighty countries, mostly in Europe, and also changed the way the Partner Program works.
Just last month, we added a bunch more — we added 77 more countries, covering a bigger chunk of the world. And we’re really happy about this.
We’ve had our first month of being able to expand beyond just the North American and European countries, so I want to mention that because I know there are some questions from people in other countries about their country not being supported by Stripe — that’s not always the case. We can support more countries than you might have known, if you just went to Stripe’s website and looked for your country. We’ll talk about that later.
Okay, so now let’s go a little bit more into the nitty-gritty. I know this is part of what people really interested in how earnings work.
Earnings are complicated. I’m going to try to strike the right balance of detail and not become too confusing, so let me know if I go too far in one direction.
Every day we look at every Member on Medium, and we look at everything they did to interact with any paywalled story. We only look at members, and we only look at paywalled stories. We are saying, during this day, we have a certain amount of budget to to distribute. We’re going to distribute it based on the interactions, behaviors, and activities of Members on paywalled stories.
An engagement or an interaction is:
- Read time. If you read over 30 seconds, that unlocks this ability to earn.
- Claps count as a certain amount of points.
- Highlights count as a certain amount of points
- Replies
- Follows
- Etc
There’s a bunch we add in and remove from here as we’re learning, because everything is about orienting around quality — which is a hard thing to capture quantitatively. But we’re slowly iterating towards that becoming — imagine this person goes to Medium and reads three stories, one of which is a paywalled story. They’re a member, so they can read it. They happen to read it for more than 30 seconds, which means that they didn’t just see it and scan it and leave, which is a proxy for “this story is delivering some value to this reader.”
They choose to clap for it, they highlight a few passages, they comment something, they even follow this writer.
Let;s say they did everything. That becomes like a base bundle of points and that’s what we used to as as the seed for all the other adjustments we make.
So you’ll see the adjustments on the right [of the slide above] here.
If you’re a Friend, Friend Members are basically people who have opted into a higher-priced tier of membership in support of the writers that they interact with. If you’re a Friend, that bundle of member engagements that you did for that story is going to be worth four times as much. So we basically add three more bundles of that of that number of points to the base. If that story is boosted, we add another undisclosed amount of bundles to that.
It’s basically saying: As a reader, everything you do will become more magnified if the story you read is Boosted and/or if you’re a Friend. Otherwise, you still have the base and that’s good too.
Then two things that we do after that is we take the read ratio for that story — this is a technical term, but it’s basically that percentage of Members that day who came to the story and read it for over 30 seconds — and you know the average read ratio fluctuates day to day, but it’s often in the 60-70%, sometimes high 70s % range.
It’s very important to realize this isn’t a punishment. What this is doing is normalizing it across everyone. If you get 70%, you’re actually not going to have any positive or negative effects from this. But if it’s lower, it might get divided a little bit out. If it’s higher, you might add a little bit more.
That’s our way of basically calibrating against clickbait stories that make a promise that they don’t deliver on.
If you don’t read for 30 seconds, it’s just not going to — you can imagine that in the past, there were incentives to get people to read even for a split second if it paid, and it just ended up being a way that the highest, best stories did not rise to the top of the earnings.
The last thing I’m sort of hand-waving at is that there are spam and fraud measures in here to make sure that there’s no disingenuous usage of bots or things like that to extract engagements.
All these together — every day, every Member, every story — we do this. We add it all up. Imagine I read three stories, Zulie reads five stories, you read one story, and someone reads 100 stories — all this stuff gets bundled into a big set. We have a daily budget that we have to allocate for that day, and that’s why every day, you see your earnings reported once a day.
And that’s how it works. That ensures that even if there are fewer people visiting Medium that day, the writers are still going to earn a consistent amount day-to-day. That’s sort of how it works, that’s very high level. We can go into more detail about those things if you want. I’m sure there are also some questions about it.
Here’s my last note that I really want to emphasize as the key. I get a lot of questions about the Partner Program all the time, and what I find is that it is really hard to understand how things are structured if you just try to like memorize it or figure out from the details. It’s a lot easier to understand if you realize that this is about aligning incentives.
We want Medium the business to want the same things that Members want. We want Members to want the same things that writers want. And we want writers to want the same things that Medium the business wants. When that’s the case, everything we do is going to naturally benefit Members and writers and ourselves.
It makes it a lot easier to make decisions when everybody wants the same thing. As we get better at doing these things and providing these services and building a better membership and building better writing tools and building a better Boost program and building a better Partner Program, it’ll become a virtuous cycle like I alluded to at the beginning and help us grow.
It’s really the seed to it, and part of why I enjoy building this, adding things, talking to people is that I always know that whatever the questions are whatever the concerns are — we aren’t trying to hide anything. We are always pretty open to doing what is best for readers and writers.
That’s maybe a bit philosophical, but it’s — I truly believe that’s the case. Great stories are something that there’s not enough of in the world. If we can add a little bit more of that and use that as the central organizing element for our business, all the better.
I’ll stop there. I can go into more detail about things but, I want to also give you plenty of time to ask questions.
Zulie: Thank you so much, Buster. I love hearing you talk about this kind of thing because I think — again, as a writer myself, before I joined Medium, I really appreciated the nitty-gritty, understanding exactly what Medium was trying to do and how those incentives played out and I’m guessing most of the folks on this call feel the same way.
I’ll do the Q&A questions first and then I’ll move on to the questions that folks submitted in the form ahead of time. Before we go into those, I just want to make sure — because the main point of this whole webinar was explaining how the Medium Partner Program works, there’s a ton of different facets, we’re going to get into a bunch of them — just post in the chat if you’re watching this: do you feel like you have at least a better understanding of how it works? Or is there any one particular key area that you’re still confused on, that we can get into specifically?
I’ll give a couple of seconds for folks to hop off in the chat, and if not, we’ve got some 10 questions in the Q&A.
[Most chat respondents said they had a better understanding, so we moved on to the Q&A.]
Q&A
Zulie: All right, we’ve got 45 minutes for Q&A. Let’s go ahead and start at the top.
Q1: Can you calculate earnings per read?
Anonymous attendee: is it true that Medium is now, per read, one to two cents?
Buster: Well, there is no per-read calculation that will make any sense in the long term, because as I explained, how the engagement bundle works is things like: are you a Friend? Is the story Boosted? What is the read ratio? Those three things will all result in a read being worth quite a variety of number of cents or even dollars, depending on if your Members are also Friends, depending on if the story is Boosted, depending on if they’re reading through the whole thing.
I know it’s really hard to move away from this idea of earnings coming from reads directly, but that was very intentional. We want to orient around quality more than just the ability to grab attention. When we incentivize attention grabbing, you see the results of that in the rest of the internet.
It’s not an easy battle to pick, but it’s one that we’ve chosen to try to put a dent into, so any attempts to try to turn reads into earnings, expected earnings is going to be kind of futile and frustrating.
Zulie: Yeah, this was always what I liked to tell folks — again, back in like my pre-Medium employee days — and it’s really cool to hear that confirmed here from an actual Medium employee. It’s really hard to break that down, and at least for myself I always felt like I was better off focusing on like — I did spend some time trying to break down, okay, if I get a thousand views and 500 reads, what is that going to mean for my month? And ultimately it didn’t matter. What mattered was writing a story that I wanted to write and that I hoped my readers would enjoy.
Q2: How is it possible for a writer to make $10,000 on a single viral article?
Constance: How is it possible for a writer to make $10,000 on a single viral article? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Buster: I’m curious why it doesn’t make sense, because we have a large budget. Every day we’re actually distributing quite a bit of money, and so stories that go viral, that story is going to accrue money over a certain number of days. If those members are Friends, that’s going to be four times as much earnings for them. If that story is Boosted, it’s going to be even more than that. So it becomes possible — I mean, it’s not easy by any means to write a viral story in the first place, but it is possible and every month we have a good handful of stories that achieve that. And it’s not like it’s the same person every time; it’s always because it really is story-dependent and and context-dependent too.
Zulie: A lot of the stories that I see do really well meet the readers where their interests are. I’m guessing it’s just kind of like meeting the Zeitgeist a little bit, like you write something that just really resonates with readers in that particular moment. That’s one of many ways to get this big story that reaches a lot of different readers.
Q3: Can earning too much money flag you to Medium?
Anonymous attendee: there is a rumor if a writer is making more than $1,000 on Medium, the Medium automation can make a false flag on it.
Zulie: I’m guessing — anonymous attendee, if you’re still here, correct me if I’m wrong — what I understand from this is like, if a writer is making too much, will Medium kick them out? That’s my reading of the question.
Buster: We look at almost every account to look for evidence of automated bot usage, or coordination, that kind of stuff. In fact, the more you earn, the more they will actually take a deeper look and make sure that things are happening. Sometimes we accidentally false-flagged people for spam or fraud in the lower earnings. It’s less likely to happen in the higher earnings.
[Editor’s note: I clarified this with Buster after the fact — he’s basically saying that if your story earns a lot, you’re less likely to be wrongly booted out because we’ll probably already have looked at your account and determined your earnings are authentic, or removed you if they weren’t. We look at all accounts that are suspended for reasons associated with fraud. Some do slip through the cracks, but if it happens, write in to support and we can remedy that.]
Q4: What’s best, Substack vs Medium?
Afab Ali: I’m new to the Medium Partner Program. I’m confused between Medium and Substack. My intention is to build a following and create quality content and of course make money so I can have the freedom to follow my passion.
Zulie: I’d like to take a stab at this first. I would say: why not do both?
I mean the obvious answer is limited time and energy, but from my perspective, newsletter platforms like Substack and writing platforms like Medium do two very different things. Newsletter platforms are such a great place to build an audience that’s only really there to see you. They are paying you money or they’re subscribing to your newsletter because they’re thrilled about your writing specifically. Medium is a really good place where somebody pays $5 a month to read your work, but also the work of the thousands of amazing, talented writers we have.
I would say, if you have the bandwidth to do both, I would recommend both because I think they both do really good but very different things.
Buster, do you have any hot takes on that?
Buster: No, same. I think Medium and building a newsletter are complementary strategies. We encourage people to use every tool in their toolbox to get their ends and see what works.
Q5: Will adding stories to Lists be an earnings factor?
Anonymous attendee: is it possible in the future that if readers add the articles in their list we get some bonus from that too?
Buster: I like that question. Yeah, that is definitely possible, and it’s one of the things that’s on our list of things to potentially explore. So yes.
Q6: How can you determine what percentage of your readers are already paying members?
Diana Stepner: How can you determine what percentage of your readers are already paying members to determine the impact of putting articles behind the paywall?
Buster: Good question. Your stats for stories will show you a breakdown of the reads by members and even the engagements by members and non-members, even for non-paywalled stories so that’s a great way to test it out and see what’s naturally happening in the wild and give you a sense for what happen if you put it behind the paywall.
Q7: Can you earn on Medium without being a Friend of Medium?
Anonymous attendee: Realistically, can you still earn as a Member without becoming a Friend?
Buster: Another really good question. Yes, absolutely. In fact, it has nothing to do with how much you’ll earn. We don’t give writers a bonus for being a Friend. The readers who become Friends are the ones who are taking a step to support writers more. We have no preference in terms of how earnings are distributed if the writer is a member or a Friend.
Q8: Why did Medium kill the referral program?
CJ Josh: Why did Medium kill the referral program?
Buster: That’s another good one. There’s a lot more detail in the blog post that was published last August, but essentially, it wasn’t working. The referral program was incentivizing people to put a lot of calls of action in their stories to become a Member. People honestly were not becoming Members through that mechanism, and so we saw it as this thing that was actually making the stories feel a little bit more less enjoyable.
Instead of just letting something that’s not working very well survive, we removed it.
That’s not to mean that there aren’t other ways that we want to encourage people to bring new readers to Medium. We’re exploring things about that. But that one just wasn’t working.
Zulie: That’s one of the things I love about Medium. Love and loved! There’s like this very experimental approach — if something doesn’t work, you move on. And it doesn’t mean that door is closed forever, like you said, we’re still looking at ways for rewarding that kind of behavior, but it wasn’t working, so we move on.
Q9: How to be more fair with the read ratio?
Gabriel Kinos: When the read ratio is bad, it’s not necessarily because we don’t deliver the thing we said in the title. Sometimes we talk about something very personal that’s not interesting, but however it wasn’t a clickbait story. How to be more fair with the read ratio?
Buster: Yeah, it’s a tough one. Of course, there are exceptions, edge cases, and anomalies that happen with the read ratio. Every month, we review this kind of stuff and look at what is the standard. Even subject by subject, category by category, there are different patterns that feel off.
I agree that there’s probably a case where this will feel unfair in a one-off basis, but right now, it’s the system. If you have any suggestions, I’m open to hearing them, but it’s really the reason we do this as a 30 second threshold — in the past, there was this idea of “completed reads” where you scroll to the bottom of a story, and that’s what would count as a read. That seems great, but it actually punished longer stories quite a bit.
Every change we make has repercussions and second-order effects, and nothing’s perfect. We’re always open to iterations on it. But that’s just the best we got so far.
Q10: Any incentives for new writers?
Bal K Muhammed: Any incentives for new writers?
Buster: Not that I’m aware of. We definitely want something like that.
One incentive is the Boost program. The Boost program doesn’t care if you’re a new writer, an established writer, if you have a giant following or not. It’s purely about the story.
New writers, I would say, focus on writing a great story, submit it to a publication that has nominators and see if it can get Boosted. That will help you not only get new readership from the publication automatically, but also if it’s Boosted, it will reach even beyond that.
Unlike places where you have to build your own audience, here you can find ways for your stories to reach an audience even if you don’t have one.
Zulie: You’re right, I really like that because compared to a lot of other platforms where there is a benefit to being really established — like on YouTube, the more followers I have and the more subscribers, I have the more views I tend to get on videos even if they’re really not that good or not that interesting — I really love that on Medium it’s as close as we can get and we’re working towards getting this closer and closer every day, is really about your story. Not how many followers you already have.
Q11: How does original vs AI content impact earnings?
Afab Ali: I need your review on original content versus AI generated content how Medium sees it and how it impacts our earnings as writers.
Buster: AI-generated stories can be published with disclosure if there is no paywall, but we don’t currently allow it if you have a paywall in your story. So even if you disclose the fact that it’s that that way, we’re moving away from that. We all know this is a quickly changing ecosystem of stuff that’s happening, and we’re trying to stay ahead of it even if it means being a little general in our approach.
We want to be able to protect the community from being overrun by AI-generated content by removing explicitly the incentive of money from that option.
Zulie: I will clarify, stuff like Grammarly — totally fine. Catch your typos, that’s not an issue. We don’t want purely AI-generated content behind a paywall because you can get that for free anywhere online. We don’t want to have our members paying for stuff that can be generated with the click of a button. They’re here for human writing and that’s really important to us.
Q12: How do you balance the payment incentives with readers who don't know to clap or leave a comment?
Anonymous attendee: Most readers don’t like to click on the clap and don’t even like to leave a response. If we talk about technology or programming articles especially, readers come for solutions rather than engagement.
Buster: It’s another one those situations where we are trying to build a general solution to a very complicated problem. There was a time when Medium was the place for finding an answer to a very specific question. It might not be in the longterm future of where we shine because places like Google and ChatGPT — they’re going to continue getting better and better at that. Some of them are already better.
Where we’re going to shine is where some amount of personal experiences are woven in.
While we’re not explicitly trying to punish technology articles, and we have seen examples of technology articles that do get lots of engagement by weaving in personal experience, that’s just a byproduct of the way that it’s set up right now. But we’re keeping an eye on it.
I think if there was a way to handle this in a different way, we’re open to it. but it’s just what it is right now.
Zulie: I’ll add as well — it is hard because different kinds of readers engage with different kinds of stories in different ways. Poetry and fiction are very different from a tech tutorial. I think that’s what I personally really like about the Partner Program formula calculation distribution is it takes into account not just claps, which know used to be the case in the distant past, not just comments — it’s looking at people staying on this article, are they reading it, are they enjoying it? Different signals, not just clapping and comments.
I know a lot of readers don’t even know that you can clap once, let alone 50 times!
Q13: Why does the Medium Partner Program only work with Stripe?
CJ Josh: There are many other big and safe platforms for withdrawing money like Payoneer, Transferwise. Why is Medium so determined to use Stripe? Is it some kind of exclusivity contract?
Buster: No contract. My approach has been: let’s support Stripe as far as we can, and then when that runs up, we’re going to explore the next. I think Payoneer is probably another great alternative for us to explore. I love to support them all. It’s just a matter of doing the work and justifying it. The more the better.
Q14: Why do some stories with fewer reads earn more than others with more reads?
Jesse: Some stories have earned more than others with less reads?
Buster: If it’s Boosted, if it’s read by Friends, if it has a higher read ratio — those are the three things that will impact its earnings even if it’s read less.
Q15: Who earns more money if I as a writer become a Friend of Medium?
Ali G: If I become a member of the Friends program, will my earnings be multiplied, or will someone else’s earnings whose article I read as a Friend be multiplied?
Buster: The latter.
Zulie: I’ve seen online people posting about how they hope becoming a Friend of Medium will affect their earnings. Correct me if I’m wrong, Buster, this is before my time at Medium, but I feel like when Medium put out the Friend of Medium tier, it was this way for the reader community to give back to other writers. When I became a Friend of Medium, that’s what I was most excited about — the thought that I could contribute to other writers, I could pay more money, I could help them support them, share their stories more widely, and make sure that they were getting paid at a higher rate when I shared their stories.
That’s more the intention versus how can I make more money.
Buster: Yeah, we really want to signal that this is about supporting writers. Because the more we support writers, the more readers will also be supported. Making it a more outwardly facing tier was intentional for sure.
Q16: Do writers get financially rewarded for external traffic?
Sam West: Is there any payout for external readers, so readers who don’t have a Medium account but do get a link to a Medium story?
Buster: If you’re not logged in or you aren’t a member, your engagements won’t impact earnings unless you come through a Friend link.
Friend-tier Members can take a paywalled story, generate a link for it, and share it anywhere. The great thing about this is that even people who come through that link will be able to read a paywalled story, and that writer will still be compensated for that visit and that read. If the reader is logged in, they can clap and comment and have that affect the writer’s earnings.
We can do that because it’s basically a proxy. The Friend Member is already paying more, and so we’re using it as a proxy for all the people that they’re referring. That’s one way to earn from external views and reads.
Q17: Do I need to enroll in the Partner Program to be sent money from Medium?
Constance: If a writer is earning money does medium contact them to deposit the money? I don’t recall giving my bank account when I joined. Perhaps I’m making money but have not received any information about that.
Zulie: There is a help document that I think will be more useful here, but in short, yes, you have to enroll in the Partner Program where you’ll connect through Stripe for us to be able to pay you.
Q18: How do paywalled stories get so many reads?
Anonymous attendee: I’m curious how some stories behind the paywall can get so many reads. Do non-members still get a few free reads per month?
Buster: No, although it’s possible — when we calculate the read ratio, we only look at member activity. It’s possible for a nonmember to read a story for more than 30 seconds even if they can’t access the full story. They still count. But it doesn’t impact earnings.
Q19: Can I choose to let earnings accumulate before paying out?
Marina: Thanks for including India and for having the session. I just started as a Medium partner and want to know: will I get paid automatically once I reach the minimum threshold, or will I get to choose when I want to claim it? Can I choose to let it accumulate?
Buster: Not at the moment, although that’s something that we want to support. The first time you exceed the $10 threshold, it will transfer automatically. But I think especially for people in places that have higher fees, I think it makes sense to hold on to it sometimes.
Q20: Can I change the country where I’m connected with Stripe?
Anonymous attendee: If you’re in a country where Stripe is not supported, and if a person is an old writer who is in an unsupported country, but it’s now a supported country and his stripe is in the USA, but he now wants to connect with a new country, how can he change his Stripe?
Buster: The solution is to write into support and ask them to disconnect your previous Stripe account, and then you can re-enroll. You won’t lose your earnings or anything like that.
Q21: What is a paywalled story on Medium?
Constance: What is a paywalled story? Is there a difference between just writing stories and having to do something to get on the paywall?
Zulie: When you write on Medium, if you are a Medium Member and you’re in the Medium Partner Program, you can choose to paywall your story. What that means is that only people who are paying Medium Members will be able to read it. That’s how you earn money writing on Medium through the Medium Partner Program.
Buster: Once you’re part of the Medium Partner Program, it’s just a tick box that you’ll see when you’re publishing to put it behind the paywall.
Q22: When should I join the Medium Partner Program?
Beatrice: when does it make sense to start joining the Medium Partner Program? I don’t have a lot of internal readers yet as I just started writing. Is there a minimum amount of articles you need to put behind the paywall to join the Partner Program?
Buster: You do need to have one story published to be part of the Medium Partner Program, but there’s no minimum beyond that.
Q23: What’s the best strategy for paywalling Medum stories?
Anonymous attendee: Do you recommend putting all or most of your stories in your paywall?
Buster: It’s up to you. As Medium the company, I would say put your best stories behind the paywall, but it’s really up to you.
Q24: Can you paywall a story that is free to read somewhere else?
Anonymous attendee: I saw an author putting a paywalled story on another page for free as well. Is that okay to do?
Buster: Yep.
Zulie: I will clarify you cannot have the same story up on Medium in two places at the same time, that’s duplicate content, that’s not allowed. But on other sites you can put it up.
If it’s the exact same content, for SEO purposes Google can get confused/angry if it doesn’t know which one is the original post because it will see that as like plagiarism which obviously they’re trying to cut down on. There is a canonical tool in Medium that lets you say this is the original post anything else is something else I own but this is the original.
That’s not a Medium requirement, that’s just a Google best practice.
Q25: Do you need to be a paying Medium Member to join the Medium Partner Program?
Anonymous attendee: Do you need to pay for Medium to be able to take part in the Medium Partner Program?
Buster: Yes, you have to be a Member to join the Partner Program. The logic behind that is that you’re writing for a community like Medium as community. There’s over a million members and we want people that are writing for the community to be part of it.
Q26: Do we get friend links for stories behind a paywall published with a publisher?
Afab Alali: Do we get friend links for stories behind a paywall, published with a publisher?
Zulie: Yes, I think if I’ve understood that question correctly, you’re asking for example if I publish a story with Better Marketing, can the writer share their friend link for a paywalled story even though it’s in a publication? If so, yes.
Q27: Do you need to be a Friend or Partner to be featured by Medium?
Shaku Kabi: As a writer, should you be a Friend or Partner to be featured in the newsletters or earn per readings?
Buster: Not necessarily newsletters. I think they look everywhere. You have to be a Medium Partner Program to earn for anything.
Zulie: I can speak to the newsletters — I write the editor newsletter, the writer newsletter, It Happened on Medium, and I also sometimes guest write The Medium Newsletter which is the one that goes out every day. We don’t look at membership status. We’re literally just looking for the best and most interesting stories or relevant stories to include in the newsletters we sent out at that day.
Q28: Is there a limit to the number of stories you can publish behind the paywall?
Anonymous attendee: Any limit of publishing articles behind a paywall in a day?
Buster: There is. It’s high — I think it’s like 15 or something. But it’s the same as the number of stories you can publish at all, so generally not a limit that you run into though.
Q29: How many reads do you need for it to be worth putting a story behind the paywall?
Anonymous attendee: Approximately how many reads would you need for a story to be worth putting behind a paywall, just to have a rough idea?
Zulie: It’s really up to you. I think it depends. I want to — I know this is about the Medium Partner Program, but I do want to say there is a lot of worth sometimes in not paywalling your stories. If you are trying to rank for SEO for example, or if you’re like just writing something that you want to share with your friends and family, or if you’re trying to use Medium more as a portfolio to get a job somewhere else.
There are benefits to paywalling, obviously, but there there are also benefits to not paywalling. It’s really hard to say, like, “Oh, once you’re once you have 100 views a day you should start paywalling,” because it’s just going to differ so much depending on what you are using Medium for.
Q30: Is there a limit to how much you can earn from Medium?
Anonymous attendee: Is there any limit of earning on Medium, maybe after some dollar amount I get kicked out?
Buster: No.
Q31: Can one person have two Medium accounts?
Anonymous attendee: Can one person have two Medium accounts with a Partner Program on, with different niche content on it?
Zulie: I think what this person is asking: one person, one Stripe account, two Medium accounts for different niches. I think logistically there’s nothing stopping you from doing that.
Buster: Yeah, that’s fine. The only thing I’d warn against is to not be logged into one account and then engage with all the other account stories all the time. That will get you flagged.
Q32: How can I reduce the withholding tax taken by Stripe on my Medium earnings?
Anonymous attendee: Here in the UK, I pay 9% income tax. Is there any way of reducing the 30% withholding tax taken by Stripe?
Buster: I actually had to ask someone this when I saw that question this morning. Sothe answer here is yes, you will have to resubmit your tax forms. If you log into the Partner Program dashboard, there’s a tax submission link. When you are doing that, we have a a tax treaty with the UK and by default all international countries have 30% withholding in the UK. You can define it to be zero or nine or whatever you want it to be. So you just have to submit the tax forms again.
Q33: Can you remain in the Partner Program if you’re not paying your Medium membership fee?
Anonymous attendee: What would happen if many people stopped paying their monthly membership fee but still remained in in the program? They would be earning without giving back. Wouldn’t that affect the amount that writers earn? Is there any problem with placing people’s membership in the Partner Program on hold if they stop paying the membership?
Buster: Yes, that’s planned. It’s not a huge amount of people right now and the budget is determined by how many Members and Friend members there are, so it would naturally adjust. But longer term, Partner Program enrollment will be inactivated if you stop being a Member.
Q34: Can I get Medium to pay me in dollars into a debit account?
Anonymous attendee: I just joined the Medium Partnership and I have three more days for my free trial to end, but the account for payment I registered with is with a debit card. Is it possible for Medium to pay in dollars into a debit account, although the second account I registered with a prepaid Visa card? Can I also register a grey.co account?
Buster: I did ask someone about this one too. This is between Stripe and your bank. If the bank does not accept incoming debits, then you’ll need a different account. It’s not our side. I would log into your Stripe account that’s connected to Medium and work through them.
Q35: Do I have to renew Medium membership every month to remain in the Partner Program?
Anonymous attendee: I purchased the Membership of Medium for a month and apply for the Medium Partner Program. Will I have to renew it every time to be eligible? If I start earning, can I pay out the whole amount in two years after two years collectively?
Buster: It goes automatically to Stripe after you reach the $10 minimum no matter what. For the first part of the question, you could do that. But earnings do get forfeited after about 180 days. If you’re above $10 and we can’t pay you, that ends up going forfeit but I think in theory you can do this if you want.
Q36: Is engagement measured at the writer level or the story level?
Anonymous attendee: Is engagement measured at the writer level or the story level? One subject I write about gets almost no engagement. Does that penalize the other subjects that do attract readers and comments?
Buster: A story level, definitely. It’s sort of a story and reader. I think some subjects have more readers than others, and so that does affect your earning sometimes.
Q37: What exactly is the Boost?
Lots: What does the Boost actually entail? How is a Boosted story distributed compared to non-Boosted stories and for how long does the Boost work?
Buster: This changes and it’s not guaranteed to always be the same, but in general when a story is Boosted we try to add an incremental 500 views for that story in a relevant targeted way to people that would be interested in it. We can’t really control views, all we can do is is send it into the feeds and the emails and stuff. To get 500 people to click on your story and and read it is our goal, and we try to do that over the course of a week or two. We don’t want it to be all in one day because spreading it out allows our recommendations algorithm to learn from the interactions of the first day and improve targeting on the next day and the next day.
Q38: Can stories make thousands of dollars without being Boosted?
CJ Josh: Are there examples of stories making thousands of dollars without getting Boosted, because I’ve become so obsessed with getting Boosted.
Buster: Yes.
Q39: How can you earn more money on stories?
Jesse: Best recommendations for accounts that earned small amounts or nothing per article?
Zulie: I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, Buster, because I have my own take.
Buster: Submit it to a publication of people where there’s lots of readers interested in the topics that you’re writing about. That’s a great way to get access to an audience, and that will that will turn into earnings.
Zulie: From a systems perspective, if you’re not already doing this, Jessem submitting to publications is one of the best ways to get your story in front of readers who you know have a pretty good chance of being interested in it.
There are some editors who do such a tremendous job tailoring these stories and really working with you to make sure that your story has the best chance of being appealing to their readers. Again from a systems perspective, if you’re especially a smaller, newer account, you don’t have any followers. It’s really hard for our system to be like, “Okay, who are we going to show this to?”
When you publish to a publication like a cat publication if you’re writing a cat story, or a food publication if you’re writing a story about food, the system is going to say, “Oh, okay this is a recipe and you’re publishing in a publication that is has readers who are interested in recipes. Let’s show it to some of them.”
Because those readers are interested in recipes, they’re going to be more likely to actually click on your story and really enjoy it and get a lot of value from it.
Q40: Quality or quantity?
Anonymous attendee: Is it truly quality over quantity with the amount of times you post on Medium? Does posting more often help you get eyes more eyes on your articles?
Zulie: I have actually answered this one from a data driven perspective because I was also curious about this. The short answer is no. Posting more often does not help you reach more readers.
There are exceptions of course, but in general people who post less frequently I think just tend to have more time to work on their story and to come up with something like a story worth telling, something that’s going to be really interesting to their readers.
From an algorithm perspective, I’ll pass over to you, Buster.
Buster: There’s no preference in the algorithm about that. I know that it’s hard to get over like the best practices of other platforms that really do encourage that.
From a reader perspective, if you’re only writing for an audience that’s there for you, being consistent over time is important. But when you’re writing for a community, it’s not as important. Spend as much time on each story to make it as good as as you can.
Q41: Is there a full list of publications on Medium?
Marina: Can you please post a list of all publications available on Medium? It becomes really hard to find ones that you would like to be part of.
Zulie: Yes, super sympathize with that. We do have two ways to do this. We have a list of over 300 publications all open to submissions, and link to the submissions pages. We also have a collaboration with Chill Subs — they made a slightly more user-friendly, filterable database of Medium publications that are open to submissions.
If you’re interested in trying to get your work nominated for a Boost, we also have a separate list of publications and the editors that are in the Boost Nomination Program. We have over 150 at this point. That’s a really good place to start, because at least then you know when you submit a story to them, your story is at least getting looked at by someone who has the ability to nominate a story to to Medium curation staff for a Boost.
Q42: How do images impact story length?
Anonymous attendee: How do images impact story length?
Buster: They they make the story longer, but they don’t necessarily impact the word count. I’m not sure if you mean like estimated reading time or something else here, but we don’t really take length into consideration on the earnings algorithms or distribution algorithms.
Q43: Do you need to be published in a publication that’s part of the Boost Nomination Program to get Boosted?
Kelsey: Can you get boosted in a publication that doesn’t have a nominator editor?
Zulie: Yes, absolutely. Nominators mostly focus on their own publications but I know currently — I don’t know how long this is going to be the case but currently — they can also look outside their publications. We also have a team of internal curators who are reading on Medium all day every day looking for stories to Boost so you don’t have to go through an a nominator only.
Q44: Can Medium comments earn money?
Anonymous attendee: Yesterday, one writer left a long and touching comment on my story. I’ve been wondering for a while now — responses are also called stories. Do they also earn when readers read for more than 30 seconds, clap, and highlight ?
Buster: No, because you can’t put responses behind the paywall even if they are on a story that’s behind the paywall.
Q45: How can you get articles featured by Medium?
Ralph Griffith: I’ve had a couple of articles that did exceptionally well but I don’t know how it happened. Could you talk more about how to get articles featured by Medium and best practices for replicating that success?
Buster: Yeah it’s a hard one. Again, it’s about getting it in front of the right people. So if you’re posting in publications, continue doing that. It is a little bit of a unpredictable scenario that I’ve experienced as well.
Zulie: I can talk a little bit more about how we look for stories to feature. A lot of it is dependent on — at least in the newsletters that I write — what’s happening in the world right now, and not just current events, but what are people interested in right now? Some things people are always interested in, like productivity. People love to hear about productivity. A couple years ago, people started getting really interested in AI. In a couple months, politics are going to be a super hot topic for the US elections that are coming up.
So sometimes evergreen, but also sometimes topical stories that add some some extra layer of context — something that I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to read like a New York Times article necessarily, or just like a random Reddit post. We’re looking for something that adds an extra layer of context that helps me understand some little angle of the world in a little bit of a better way. It can be fiction, it can be poetry, it can be a tech tutorial. That’s what I’m looking for when I’m picking stories to to put in my newsletters.
Zulie: All right, we are at time, and I am in a booked room so somebody’s probably going to be knocking on the door very shortly. Buster, thank you so so so much for your time and your generosity and answering all these questions. I really hope that has been clarifying for folks to understand the Partner Program a little bit better now.
If you have more questions, leave a comment on this story. You can also always email me at zulie [at] medium [dot] com. Anything to add, Buster?
Buster: No, just thank you everyone for your great questions, thanks Amy for helping out with the with the links. See you next time!