I Recently Started Auditioning My Growing Audience
They can’t watch me play unless they pay
You have to be cruel to be kind to yourself.
Culling is the only solution when an over-population of NMF.s (Non- Member Followers) threatens sustainability. I had to get rid of the prevalence of predators to protect my environment.
That said, I’ll return to the theatre analogy, seeing as I used it in my titles, and wouldn’t want you to accuse me of misleading you.
I should have auditioned my audience years ago
Well, I used to in the days when I had a few hundred followers. It was quick and easy to eliminate those who entered my theatre without a valid ticket. But once my audience passed the 1K milestone, and my earnings had improved, I stopped bothering.
But that all changed this year when I saw the inexplicable growth of N.M.F.’s.
Medium now only offers one free Read before a person must subscribe, compared to the previous policy of three free Reads per month — a massive reduction in unpaid access. Yet, the Non-Member Reads are on the rise.
Scrolling down my list of followers to check their credentials was too daunting a task. Instead, I took the lazy road of checking the weekly ‘Your audience is growing’ emails as their numbers aren’t too overwhelming.
The outcome?
For the period spanning 1 April to 15 July, I blocked 40% of the total. The majority were non-members, with a few Error Codes 404 and 410 in the mix.
Since then I’ve taken to checking every new follower that appears in my Notifications feed. If they don’t pass the audition, they’re out.
Here’s how I do it
I open their About page to check their status by scrolling to the bottom for “Medium Member since date/year”. (I found one sneaky devil who typed that message at the top of their About page — I’m not a fool, dear!)
Friends of Medium are easy to identify — the yellow heart and text appear below their profile photo. I promise I’ll never block you — I love you guys!
If not a member or friend, I click the three black dots and “Block this author”, then wait for the confirmation message to appear.
On my first blocking excursion I learned, despite seeing the confirmation message, Medium may not block the first time. So I double-check by going to their Home page. If their stories still appear, I refresh their Home page to seal the deal.
We all know Notifications can be iffy at times, so I’m still auditioning new followers featured in the weekly “Your audience is growing” emails. I’ve had to cull a few who never appeared in my Notifications feed.
Hooray! I can’t read their stories (not that I’d want to anyway) and they can’t read mine; nor follow, view, clap, highlight, or leave mindless comments.
No more grey areas on my story stats graphs!
I also block AND report ordinary members who use Medium as an advertising platform for their products and/or services. Seems silly to subscribe when they can promote their business at no cost, as others on this platform do.
Truth be told, they only follow you to attract your attention, not to support your writing.
Let’s take one I blocked who follows 20,000+ people. They would need to read 55 stories every day, including weekends, to engage with each of these writers only once each in an entire year.
I’ve also come across non-members who paywall their stories. How did they slip through the cracks? One of the new rules for eligibility to join the Medium Partner Program is you must be a subscribing member????
What happens when a non-member previews your story?
I raised this issue with Medium Support in October last year.
My question:
As an experiment, I accessed Medium in Incognito mode on Chrome to test how much of a story is visible to a non member. I’m not a slow reader, but it took me 40 seconds to read the visible part of the story. Of course, this distorts the story stats as reads are calculated on a person’s reading for at least 30 seconds.
Please, can you reduce the visible portion of the story? In the case of a short-form story or poem, the entire piece will be visible and therefore does not encourage people to subscribe. This has a negative impact on a writer’s earnings.
Their answer:
I have passed this feedback on to the paywall team. They are looking at the preview size now.
That was nine months ago — that baby has not been delivered.
I know this for a fact because I checked this out with my nephew in the UK last weekend.
Although he’s not a member — he supports me financially in other ways — he’s an email subscriber. We set this up so he can ask me for a Friend Link if he wants to read one of my stories.
I asked him to open one of my stories from his emails and send me a screenshot of the preview. I chose my latest boosted story (one of only three ever boosted) because the Views and Reads are higher than usual, leading to more meaningful analysis.
The visible portion comprised 126 words, which took me 28 seconds to read — a borderline case, as I’m obviously familiar with what I wrote. Chances are somebody else could take longer.
I then applied simple arithmetic, using research from Scholar Within, Google, and other reliable sources like Ghent University, which states an adult reads at an average speed of 238 words per minute when reading silently.
Divide this figure by two, and an average reader can tackle 119 words in half a minute. As a result, a non-member previewing those 126 words will probably pass the 30-second mark and the View automatically becomes a non-member Read.
The stats for this boosted story reflect 58% of Views and 46% of Reads were by non-members.
What’s the simple solution?
Reduce the preview to 20 seconds.
If I can’t tempt them into my story in the first 80 words, my introduction sucks. This would also benefit writers of 100-word stories and shorter poems. — a haiku, for instance.
What else can a non-member do from a preview?
I conducted further tests with my nephew and discovered that
- Non-members can clap from the preview, i.e. without reading the entire story, both on the Medium web version and on the Medium app.
- They can also comment on a story from the preview, but only on the Medium app.
He could do all this without signing up for a subscription as Medium had requested, so though I wasn’t able to look over his shoulder, he assured me he clapped and left a comment without being able to read my entire story.
This then puts paid to my earlier suggestion that Medium reduces the preview to 20 seconds (around 80 words) because non-members would exceed that time limit if they’re clapping and commenting.
Catch-22!
At least I can continue auditioning for as Denis Waitley says,
“Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.”
I’m taking the same approach on Medium. At least I’m doing something!
What are your thoughts on these issues?
