Analyzing the Decision to Demonetize Meta Stories About Medium
This story won’t be monetized. But I’m writing it anyway.
The Decision
At the beginning of this month, Medium enacted a change that felt like a blow to many of those who write on here regularly:
- “Meta” stories, or stories that focus on Medium, will be demonetized
In February, Scott Lamb, the VP of Content at Medium, wrote the following in an email to members of the MPP, Medium’s writer program. In case you missed it, I copied and pasted the relevant text from that email below:
Removing “meta” stories from the paywall
A change is coming to the way we approach stories in the Partner Program about Medium, what we often call meta stories. Those kinds of stories are already something we try to keep out of your feeds as a reader unless you’ve specifically asked to follow them. The goal of the Medium Partner Program is to deliver value to readers and writers, and we often hear from our members that these kinds of stories aren’t the ones they want to read, much less pay for. You’re free to write meta stories, we just don’t want Partner Program funds going to them. Payments seem to incentivize extra navel gazing and unwanted get-rich-quick culture. In March, we will start notifying writers when we see their meta stories behind the paywall, and then begin removing them.
My Observations
Since the beginning of this month, I’ve been watching 2 things:
- My earnings
- How many meta stories populate my feed
In addition, in February, I went through my list of published stories and deleted most of them. They covered a variety of topics, mostly about writing in general, and a handful discussed Medium outright. Note that this decision wasn’t directly due to the change in this policy.
I also demonetized the one Medium story I wrote over a year ago that I chose to leave on this platform.
First, my earnings have tanked, like many others. Unless there is something wrong with the Medium app (which is possible), I have reads logged for this month and new followers, yet I’ve earned exactly $0.00 so far. Since I culled 80% of my published stories, I expected a huge drop in reads and earnings. I just wasn’t expecting to be at zero earnings halfway through this month.
Second, I’ve also noticed that the number of meta stories about Medium has dwindled. I used to see these regularly in my feed since this is what I consume a lot of as a reader. Now, I see maybe one per week. It’s possible Medium ramped up suppressing them from the algorithm. However, I follow publications that focus on this topic, and there are very few stories in those publications now.
Analyzing the Decision
I can’t fathom why this change happened. Other authors are scratching their heads on this as well. So let's break down some potential reasons.
Potential Reason #1: Promoting Stories They Want to Shape Medium
Is this a push toward rewarding stories that Medium wants their readers to read? We call this “positive reinforcement.”
However, Medium’s mission is as follows (pulled directly from their About page):
Ultimately, our goal is to deepen our collective understanding of the world through the power of writing.
Wouldn’t this reasoning go against that very idea? If people want to read stories about Medium, let Medium writers deepen the readers’ understanding of what it’s like to write on Medium. Give the readers a view of the other side.
And listen to the feedback, absorb it, and evolve. Deepen your collective understanding of what writers want by supporting their power of writing. Practice what you preach.
While Medium isn’t directly censoring stories about Medium, not paying writers for writing about Medium seems unfair. And suppressing them outright seems to go against the mission.
Potential Reason #2: Silencing Criticism
Is this about silencing criticisms about the platform? I think a lot of writers believe this to be the primary reason. If this is the case, I don’t think this was thought through. Because now, like this story you’re currently reading, we can write stories about Medium that are free for anyone to read, are found and indexed by search engines, and can be easily shared.
If writers keep writing about Medium on Medium, access to those stories is wide open now. You can already find these stories all over Substack (also indexed by search engines), but many of those are behind a paywall. There‘s no gatekeeping here now.
Potential Reason #3: Reducing the Number of Meta Stories
If this is about demotivating writers from writing stories about Medium so there are less on the platform to suppress, well, that is working. I can say with 100% confidence that there are way fewer stories now about Medium than I’ve ever seen. I’ve been on this platform for 7 years. The change is palpable.
But what’s weird about this reasoning is…writers on Medium love reading stories about writing on Medium. CEO Tony calls these types of readers the “echo chamber” and he’s not wrong. From what I remember, Tony also said the stats of this type of reader are insignificant compared to the other types of readers on Medium.
If you’re not serving all types of readers, you will lose some of them. Maybe Medium believes them to be too insignificant of a number to care about. However, my counterargument here is that many of us who read meta stories also read many other types of stories. We cross-pollinate. Don’t count us out.
^^ Those are the 3 reasons I could come up with. It’s also possible (and very likely) that it’s due to a combination of the above.
We’ll probably never know.
The Repercussions
I see writers quitting or leaving Medium for many reasons all the time. That number has increased dramatically in the past 2 years, or at least for the writers I follow. While this demonetization decision is not the cause since it’s so recent, there are repercussions from this decision and others like it to consider.
When your quality writers leave due to poor earnings (or a perception of uneven pay earned compared to effort produced), demotivating policies, and other changes, that leaves behind potentially crappy or nefarious writers who have figured out how to game the system. This motivates the wrong kind of writers.
Quality suffers. Both writers and readers continue to leave. The platform continues to enshittify.
It will be difficult and possibly too late to turn things around once the numbers get to a certain point.
The truth is, making pennies on each story is not worth our time and effort since the cost of living increases around the world every day. As I read in someone else’s story earlier this year, when quality writers leave, Medium effectively switches to “outsourced” writers. Outsourcing is a bad word in America, synonymous with “poor quality.” In this context, it’s intended to mean writers who write fast (either with or without AI assistance), write lower-quality stories, and/or are motivated to keep writing because they can survive on lower pay.
Medium has lost me as a reader and a writer, not because of this one decision but because the reading quality has suffered too much. I noticed it 2 years ago, and it continues to get worse. This change pushed things over the edge for me, as my feed is no longer where I want it to be.
I will not be renewing my subscription this year. Medium’s algorithm and policies no longer align with what I want as a reader or writer.
They won’t cry over my lost subscription. I won’t cry over my lost subscription. My story will join many others like it, and the world will move on. But I will look back on the fun times here, which are now years ago.
Why do you think Medium made this change?
And how do you feel Medium is changing as a result of this and other recent changes?
