Member-only story
Medium in January 2025 Only Fit For Hobby Writers & Readers?
What’s your strategy while Medium sorts stuff out?
As a dwelling for serious and committed writers, Medium has deteriorated from a mansion to a mobile home–or maybe a shack!
Susie Kearley 🐹 Guinea pig slave Speculates
On Jan 8th, she shares her stats. Her story published on Jan 5th had 23 reads, earning $1.15, while her story published on Jan 8th, with the same number of reads, earned precisely $0.00. She says:
Medium says there are delays in the system, so hopefully things will look brighter soon, but it’s a little disconcerting. … But it’s a glitch. Another glitch. I wonder if the disappearing read times on previews is also a glitch or whether that is a deliberate ploy to get us to read longer stories. –Oh Dear Medium!
On Jan 11th, in What If It’s not a Glitch?, she describes her discovery that it’s a deliberate tweak, explained by Scott Lamb in The Medium Blog.
In addition to suspending accounts we’ve found engaging in this behavior, we’ve made some tweaks to the way earnings are calculated to better reward genuine behavior and discourage gaming.” –Why we’ve suspended some Partner Program accounts this week
Describing her stats for recent days, she says:
Here are today’s stats. 84 reads for ‘Oh Dear Medium’ and 7 cents in earnings. Seriously, I think this might be a change in policy. My longest read, my best quality piece, which the publication editor ‘featured’ under the new system, has earned zero for 5 reads.
Susie speculates why not all writers are experiencing this earnings drop in *Not* Everyone’s Earnings Have Plummeted. First, she describes a writer she knows.
Knowing how this chap behaves — writing great content, occasionally, for readers in a couple of niches. He doesn’t have dozens of comments on his articles. People read his stories but they don’t always comment. They just read. He’s not an obvious big earner. His comments feed isn’t busy, but his earnings out-perform mine by miles. And probably yours, too.
He attracts some of Medium’s core readers. They are not other writers. They are just…
