What Tony Told Editors About Medium Earnings

And the rest of us are dying to know…

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Marcus Musick came across a YouTube video a few days ago. It showed the content of an online chat group between Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and a selection of Medium publication editors who are also members of the group. The video provided some insight as to what he thinks might be happening with earnings.

I screengrabbed some shots of the conversation between Tony and editors, so I could blow up the screens to read what exactly he said. I’ll paraphrase it below, because quoting someone’s words directly from a private message is against Medium rules, apparently, and I’m not sure if it’s private. I’ll give you the gist.

According to the YouTube video, Tony said there is a Medium ‘echo chamber’. He described the echo chamber as ‘pockets of writers writing for writers’. He added that the people caught up in the echo chamber don’t see anything from outside of the echo chamber.

Most of the money from the partner program ‘goes to topics like data science’, he said, adding that writers in this ‘echo chamber’ don’t acknowledge this. In my opinion, they probably don’t know about it! I didn’t know that data science is getting a large chunk of the earnings pool.

He added, he thinks it is good for writers to support writers. But he surmised that perhaps the earnings of people caught in this ‘echo chamber’ are down because the algorithm sees it as an engagement ring. He even suggested that perhaps there was something awry with the calculations (subscriber money had been ‘overcalculated’) because such accounts should not be penalised. Although the wording of this statement was confusing.

He also reiterated his previous statement that Medium is not in financial trouble.

Medium is ‘spot checking’, he said, and still intends to pay authors the same way they did in November. But the Medium staff have to wait to see what follows the shakeout following mass account suspensions. He said they were paying ‘somebody’ every day. But he didn’t seem to be sure who!

There is a deliberate change afoot for Medium Meta stories. It’s ‘a big change’ he said. They don’t want to pay for Meta stories. “Those earnings are down and they are going…