I Recently Started Auditioning My Growing Audience

They can’t watch me play unless they pay

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay — Text added by Author

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…