It’s frustrating to publish your story only to realize it’s paywalled when you didn’t want it to be, or vice versa. Equally, it’s annoying to intend to notify your subscribers about your new story but accidentally publish the story without ticking the box that would do that.

We heard from writers that most of you tend to have a personal default action for both of those options, with only rare exceptions.

Now, you can set a default paywall setting for all new stories.

Head on over to your settings and update your publishing preferences here. All new stories you publish will have the settings you choose applied by default.

You’ll still be able to change the settings on the pre-publish page of every story — this just lets you set a default.

What changed?

Before, both the paywall settings and the settings to notify your subscribers via email defaulted to whatever you had chosen previously.

For example, if you normally don’t paywall your stories, but you did once, that box would still be checked the next time you published a story. Many writers understandably would forget to uncheck the box the next time, and the story would be paywalled by accident.

This was a frustrating enough experience that over the years, hundreds of writers sent in tickets about a mistaken paywall setting, or that they’d accidentally published without notifying their subscribers.

We’re really happy to be able to share these improvements. They’re pretty small, but we hope they’ll make writing and publishing on Medium just a bit easier.

You’ll still be able to change the paywall and email notification settings on your story in the pre-publish page. You can also choose to add the paywall to your story or remove it at any time. This is just a setting that should make it a little easier to publish your stories on Medium the way you want.

Questions? Feedback? Let us know in the responses. And a big thank you to everyone who wrote in a support ticket about these issues — you help make Medium better, and we’re grateful for your input.

Writers, you can now set-and-forget your default paywall and subscriber notification settings was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note 09/11/25: These changes have rolled out to all users.

Medium writers want to understand how they’re reaching readers, and what stories help build long-term audiences. We’re excited to announce we’ve added new insights to the stats pages to help writers get that information.

You can now see how many times we presented your story across the platform for readers to click on, which we call presentations, as well as how many followers and email subscribers came to you from a specific story.

We hope these improvements help you understand how readers find your stories and choose to follow you.

A detailed look at the new stats pages

On the main stats page, you’ll now see three new headline stats: the presentations, followers, and subscribers you gained in the current month. (Note: we only have presentation data for stories published after January 1, 2025.)

Presentations are anywhere your story showed up on the Medium website or app — on the home feed, in search, as a related story, or on the topic pages. We also count email and push notifications, which happen when a reader subscribes to be notified when you publish a new story.

As you scroll down, you’ll be able to see presentations per story.

If you click into a story, you’ll now see a reach funnel that shows you how many people Medium showed your story to, how many people have viewed your story, and how many have read your story for at least thirty seconds. This should give you an idea of how Medium users are reacting to your story when they see it on their feeds, compared with other possible stories they could click on and read.

We calculate the percent of Medium users who click through on your story when they see it in their feed, which you can see in the views portion of your stats.

You’ll also see how that story affected your follower and subscriber counts.

If you head over to the Audience tab, you’ll see two simple charts outlining your growth. This gives you the big-picture look at how your long-term readership is growing.

How to use these improvements

We hope these additions to the stats pages give you more insight into how many casual browsers choose to click, read, and ultimately turn into your followers or even subscribe to get notified when you publish new stories.

In a recent survey we ran, we learned that around 60% of writers who publish paywalled stories come back to the stats pages multiple times per day after they publish. As a fellow stats hound, I can relate. It’s so interesting to understand how a story is performing, and crucially, what I can do to make future stories perform better.

The big picture advice is this: They’re your stats, on your stories, about how your audience responded to your writing, so it’s tough to give blanket guidance. The best suggestion I can give is to put yourself in your reader’s shoes, with this extra information you now have. If you were a reader, what would and wouldn’t make you click on and read a story out of all the other options? What would make you want to follow the writer?

Here are a few suggestions of how you could interpret these new stats. Keep in mind these are not one size fits all recommendations! You know your audience best.

• If you notice you have a lot of presentations but not that many views, that might mean your title is not appealing to the readers it’s reaching. In future stories, try another style of title and see if you can provide more value up front to readers. It could also be because your story is reaching a much wider audience than normal, which naturally will result in a lower feed clickthrough compared with a narrower, more loyal audience.
• You could also make sure you are choosing the right topics when you publish your story. Topics help readers find your stories, so using the right ones ensures you’re giving your story the best chance of reaching an interested audience.
• If you get plenty of views, but a lower read ratio, there could be a mismatch between what your title promises and what’s in your intro. Work on making your introductions deliver on the promise of your titles.
• Getting reads, but not many followers? Readers may not be totally convinced they want to stay up to date with your future work. Fill out your bio or profile and make sure you give them a reason to want more from you.
• If you stories aren’t getting many presentations, our data show that topics and publications really help bring your story in front of potentially interested readers — this is especially important for new writers without many followers. Find a good-fit pub and double-check you’re adding up to five topics.

Note: Avoid clickbait titles or images to improve presentations and feed clickthrough rates. Readers hate clickbait and don’t tend to read those stories, so Medium will be less likely to recommend those stories to additional readers. Clickbait stories are also likely to be marked for the lowest level of internal distribution on Medium, which we call Network Only, further limiting their potential reach. Read more about our clickbait policy here.

We also recommend keeping an ongoing eye on these new stats, rather than making decisions based on too little data. It’s tempting to draw conclusions about your feed clickthrough after getting just a few presentations, but try to wait a few days to see how your story performs. This will help you gather more information about how readers are reacting to your story.

Any questions? Check out our Help Center article and FAQ. If there’s anything you’re still wondering about, please let us know in the responses below.

With the newly updated stats pages, we want you to have more information about how you’re reaching readers, and how readers are choosing to engage with your writing. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

Which stories reach and grow your audience? Your new stats pages tell you was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Publication editors now have the option to manage all their publication submissions from both new and existing writers in the Stories tab of their publication. All editors will also be able to manage submissions more easily, in ways detailed below.

Publications are our communities on Medium. This improvement is aimed at making it as simple as possible for editors to curate and edit stories their readers will love, and for writers to find and contribute to publications they’re interested in.

For more information, read the Help Center article all about this update.

What are the improvements from an editor’s perspective?

You can choose to manage submissions from existing writers and new writers in one place, and the publication inbox is now more streamlined, with better filtering and feedback options.

Managing all submissions in one inbox

You have the option to allow any writer to submit stories to your publication, not just ones you’ve added to your publication as a writer. This means you don’t have to manage two separate inboxes of submissions from new versus existing writers — they can all live in the same place.

In the submission settings, you’ll now be able to choose who you allow submissions from:

1. Approved writers (that is, writers you have already added to your publication)
2. All writers, including approved writers AND guest writers whom you have not yet added to your publication
3. No writers at all, if you want to close your pub to all submissions

You can set what kind of stories you’ll accept — unpublished drafts, published stories, or both. You can set a link to your submission guidelines, which all writers will have easily accessible before submitting stories to you.

A streamlined, better-organized inbox

Inside your publication inbox, you’ll be able to see a list of submissions, including stories only from guest writers, approved writers, or both.

If you’ve made requests for edits via private note, you can set the status as “edits requested,” which will show up in a writer’s stories page — or switch it to approved or declined if you’ve made up your mind with no further feedback needed.

Any status change one editor makes will be reflected to all editors of the publication in the inbox, which makes multi-editor collaboration easier.

What will writers experience?

Writers who have already been added to your publication will see your publication pop up in the “Contributing” page below, which pops up when they submit a story to a publication. If you’re open to new writers, and the writer follows you, your publication will show up in the “Following” tab when they click “Submit to publication” on their draft.

Once they select a publication, the writer will need to confirm they have read your submission guidelines.

From there, the editor can change the status, which the writer (and other editors from the publication) will see on their end, too.

How editors can opt into the new publication submissions flow

All editors will be able to use this improved submissions flow once this feature is fully rolled out. If you want to be able to manage both new writer submissions and existing writers in the same inbox, you can easily opt in by going to the Submission settings tag and selecting “Open to all” in the Submission mode section.

I’ve created a video here to walk through what the new flow looks like from both the writer and the editor perspective. You can also check out the Help Center for additional details.

Publication submissions should be simple and seamless

Editors have often told us they wished managing submissions were easier. Previously, editors had to design an application process from scratch to allow writers to be added, since there was no way for writers to find and apply to write for publications. It was manual and cumbersome, and it made creating and running a publication challenging.

Now, editors can easily see and manage the state of their submissions in one place. Writers can control their submissions to publications in one place and easily discover new publications that are open to submissions.

We hope this makes publishing and writing on Medium simple, rewarding, and fun.

FAQ

Q: How do I opt in?

We’re rolling out the feature — when your publication gets access, you’ll be able to access this new management system for submissions from your existing writers. If you want to also manage submissions from new writers in the same place, go to your Submission settings tab and select “Open to all.”

Q: What if I try it and change my mind?

Editors go through seasons of life, just like everyone else! You can change the submissions settings as frequently as you want. If you get busy and can’t manage any new submissions, you can close your pub to all. If you only want to work with existing writers for the moment, that’s fine. If you only want to allow submissions from new writers one week per month, you can do that. It’s up to you how you manage publication submissions.

Q: How do I control my submissions?

You have multiple ways to control your submissions, from choosing to open your publication submissions to all writers, or keeping it just for existing writers. You can choose to allow only unpublished drafts, published stories, or both.

Q: What if I get spammy submissions?

You have a few ways to control this. You can block the writer from submitting to your publication (this won’t block the writer from your account, only from submitting to your publication). You can add stringent limits on submission numbers, so for example, only allow one submission per writer. And if you want, you can always set it so you only get stories from existing writers, and manage new writer submissions the way you did before.

Q: What’s coming next?

We want to improve communication between writers and editors, streamline workflows for multi-editor publications, and investigate new (and fun!) ways for writers to discover publications that are open to submissions.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these improvements.

Update 09/25: We’ve updated New writers to Guest writers. Guest writers are a category of writers who can submit a story to your publication but have not been added to your publication as an Approved writer. They are limited to three submissions at any given time. You’ll still have Approved writers as writers whom you have added to your publication in your publication settings. They have unlimited submissions. We added this category to make the distinction clearer and more straightforward.

We’ve removed the setting where submissions submitted by the publication’s editors would automatically be approved. Submissions by all writers will default to the “Pending review” status in the submission inbox.

We’ve removed submission status filters from the submission inbox. Based on feedback we’ve received, we wanted to simplify the page, and make it easier to navigate the submission inbox.

Finally, you can once again decline a submission in the editor. The decline option is at the top right of the editor. Once declined, the submission will be removed from your submission inbox. Related, writers can now resubmit a previously declined story to the same publication.

Update 8/26: Our engineers have fixed a bug where editors did not receive emails about new submissions from writers. Any new submission will result in an email for editors with those settings turned on. Go to Settings > Notifications > Click “Allow email notifications” and “Activity on your published stories.”

Publication editors, welcome to your new submissions inbox was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two weeks ago, the Medium team paused our regular work to focus on shipping small improvements for writers and readers. Inspired by a conversation with an editor, we called this Hot Broccoli Week.

The idea began earlier this year when the editor shared feedback that some of our recent changes had felt unappetizing, like cold broccoli. This feedback galvanized our team into thinking differently: What if we we shipped small, user-facing improvements that had outsized, positive impact on how they used our product? We decided to turn the metaphor on its head — and Hot Broccoli was born.

While we normally focus on shipping changes as part of major product initiatives with big impact for readers and writers, Hot Broccoli Week was all about improving the quality of the Medium platform in small but meaningful ways. To make it a success, we invited team members from across the company to submit their candidates to a shared Hot Brocc-log, a backlog of improvements and fixes we could make across platforms. These suggestions came directly from writers and users, based on feedback and research. The idea of “hot broccoli” also provided a fun, cruciferous theme for the week, which featured custom broccoli emojis, a broccoli profile pic competition, broccoli-themed prizes, and more (to say nothing of countless broccoli puns throughout the week).

The work paid off. Our small team completed 30+ user-facing changes in the product, as well as many more internal optimizations to our platform, tooling, and processes. We focused on what we’d heard the most feedback about, as well as on what we could reasonably complete in a week. We cleaned up old bugs, improved our site search, and made Medium look and feel nicer to use across the web and mobile apps. Here is a detailed look at what we accomplished:

• We undertook a large-scale effort to de-index spammy stories and accounts from Medium’s on-site search, and we ultimately removed 100 million spam records from search results. As a result, search results are more accurate and you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly.

• We made improvements to make search results more consistent. This means you’ll now see the same results for the same search query across surfaces where results appear, such as in the search dropdown and on results pages.
• We revisited our ranking and sorting factors, tweaking them to better surface relevant content for search terms. For example, we now surface publications that match the query in the dropdown.

• We added new hot keys to open and close the search bar. You can now press Cmd+K to open the search menu, as well as the esc key to close it. This is a common pattern in many desktop apps and makes it extra easy to start searching.
• We fixed a bug with the search dropdown menu that prevented it from correctly closing after pressing “Enter” and caused it obscure the results. The dropdown now disappears and the search results are fully visible.
• We changed up old, outdated brand art across the site. Goodbye, old ASCII art of Medium past! You’ll now see our new and improved brand imagery whenever you do things like share medium.com.
• We rolled out new default preview images for stories published without images. These will appear in story previews throughout the platform.

• We improved features in our internal admin tools, like making it possible to search our admin tool via user’s email address. This simple change will allow Medium’s Support team to create shortcuts to access user accounts directly, which means we’ll be able to respond to your Support tickets even faster.
• We designed and built an onboarding survey for new users, which will allow users to optionally share more information about themselves with Medium as they join our community. This means we can more accurately identify new features that you want.
• We made it easier to sign in to Medium accounts on web. When logging in, we now send both a login code and a magic link by default. Instead of clicking the magic link, you can simply enter the six-digit code sent to your email address, and you’re in!

• We fixed a bug in the iOS app that caused tooltips to appear in triplicate. Now, tooltips should appear once and correctly close when clicking “Okay, got it.”
• We fixed a bug in which our iOS app UI appeared overlaid on the iOS UI. This ensures that the iOS UI features like the clock, Wi-Fi connection, and device battery life always remain visible while using the app.
• We improved the behavior of the apps after editing a published story. Now, after updating a published story, the story page will refresh to reflect the newly published changes.
• We fixed buggy behavior in the implementation of “sections” in the Android editor. It’s now much easier for writers to add and remove sections between other media and content types.
• We fixed issues with deep linking in both the iOS and Android apps, making it easier to access screens like reading history and stats within the app.
• We made it easier to find recently edited drafts in the Drafts screen of the iOS app.
• We updated the UI for “empty” states across the iOS app, making it clearer and easier to understand when a list or tab in your user profile or library has no content in it. We also updated the information on those screens to clarify what actions you can take to fill them with stories.

• We fixed a bug in the Android app in which users would be logged out after switching between light and dark mode. Now, you’ll stay signed in after switching themes.
• We made it easier to clap for stories in the Android app by increasing the size of the tap targets for clapping.
• We improved the the publishing flow in the iOS Editor to display an error message if you try to publish a story without a title or body copy.
• We improved the UI of the “Follow” button in the “Who to Follow” section of the iOS app, making it easier to tap and follow new Medium writers.
• We fixed some unclear or outdated copy across the site, making it easier to understand Medium emails and in-product messaging like tooltips.

These are ultimately just some of the tasty changes we released in the span of a week! There were even more changes we made internally to our tools and processes to help us better serve Medium users. While we are proud of what we accomplished during Hot Broccoli Week, there’s always more on our list to be done.

To everyone who has shared feedback with us about ways we can make Medium better: Thank you! We’re listening, and we appreciate how much our community of readers and writers care about Medium. We’ll continue to make improvements to Medium in our pursuit of building the best place for reading and writing on the internet.

Florets and fixes: Updates from Medium’s internal “Hot Broccoli” Week was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Publications and publication editors help make Medium what it is: a place for writers and readers to find their community. We hear from our users all the time that they love publications, but we also hear how there are a lot of ways they could be better.

Today, we’ve completed a comprehensive codebase migration, focusing on the code that powers the backend of publications. This includes a handful of initial changes designed to streamline publication design, management, and creation, detailed below. But the important part of this migration is that we can now build on publications better and faster.

Publications do amazing work to connect great writers with engaged readers through meaningful stories. We’re doing our part to make that as seamless as possible.

The rollout is ongoing this week, 7/7/25. If you don’t see these changes to your publication, they are on their way. We are excited to hear what you think of them!

What change is coming to publications?

Here’s what publication editors can expect from our initial changes.

Publication management settings, including editing the About page, are now all in one dropdown menu, making it easier to review and edit your publication. You can check it out in the Manage publication dropdown menu located at the top right of your publication homepage.

We’ve standardized design across publications and Medium pages, improving the way writers and readers learn about your publication.

You can give readers a new feed in your publication to filter and find certain types of stories. To do this, create a navigation tab that directs to the “archived stories” tab type.

Finally, we’ve updated the look of publications to match on both web and mobile for a more seamless experience.

If you’re an editor, you have received an email with the full list of the changes to expect for your publication and a 3-minute video walkthrough.

If you are a reader or writer on Medium who doesn’t run a publication, you will most likely only notice that publications now look more similar, so it’s easier for you to navigate them and find the stories you’re most interested in.

Join us in building communities

You may not notice much on the surface of publications, other than a few small quality-of-life improvements. Underneath the surface, this change represents a huge amount of work and investment to update code from several versions of publications spanning across more than ten years. We’ve brought all publication code under one big umbrella.

Before, the code that powered publications was a little piecemeal, so making improvements or changes of any kind was a big effort. Now that it’s all standardized, we will improve the pace and scope of our work on publications.

We’re investing this time and engineering resources because we believe in the future of publications on Medium. We want to make them beautiful, easy to use, a natural home for writing, and a place where you can build and grow communities.

Your feedback is critical. The changes are rolling out this week, so once you start seeing the new version, let us know in the responses what you think.

Thank you for helping make Medium the best place to read and write on the internet.

Medium publications are now easier to organize and navigate was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s now easier to get email notifications about stories from writers you follow. Previously, the options to follow and get notified about a writer’s new stories were available separately, but now you can easily do both in one click.

This makes it quicker and easier to manage your preferences and keep tabs on writers you want to see in your inbox.

To get email notifications about stories from a writer you’ve just discovered, click the follow button on one of their stories, then choose Email notifications on. When that writer publishes a new story and chooses to send it to their email subscribers, you’ll receive a story preview directly to your inbox.

For writers you already follow, simply open one of their stories and adjust your notification preferences by clicking on the Following button. To learn more, check out this support article.

We want to make it simple for readers to stay in the loop on new stories, and for writers to be able to connect more easily with their readers on Medium. Try it out when you see it and let us know what you think. We’re always reading your feedback and working to make your experience on Medium better.

P.S. We’re rolling this change out across Medium now. This feature will be available to everyone over the next week, so stay tuned if you don’t see it just yet.

Keep up to date with Medium writers you love even more easily was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few months ago, we launched Featured stories for publications as a way for publication editors to directly influence story recommendations for their followers. Since then, our team has released multiple improvements, making Featured stories visible in stats and post page labels.

Now, we’re excited to give Featured stories even wider distribution and more prominent placement on each user’s logged-in Homepage — great news for both writers and readers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out new Featured story push notifications and new “Featured” story Homepage feeds for publication followers.

For writers, this means even more people seeing your Featured stories. For readers, it will be easier than ever to see Featured stories from all of the publications you follow.

In addition to being recommended more highly in Digest emails, the For You feed, and publication story pages, Featured stories now will be pushed directly to a publication’s followers via in-app notifications. Followers with the Medium app installed on iOS or Android also can receive Featured story push notifications whenever a publication they follow features a story.

Featured stories also will appear in the new Featured tab on the homepage for logged-in users. Unlike many of Medium’s other feeds, which include content recommendations from the Medium algorithm and our in-house curation team, the Featured feed highlights all Featured stories from publications that a user follows in the order they were featured. This means readers will never miss out on seeing a publication’s Featured story.

The Featured feed is another way that Medium is investing in both publications and human curation. Publication editors play an important role in understanding what kind of content is uniquely valuable to their readers. By giving publication editors more control over the content that followers of the publication see on Medium, we are excited to help even more stories find the right audience. To learn more about Featured stories, check out the help center.

P.S. We’ve had the Featured feed turned on for Medium staff for about a month now. What started as a staff-only prototype made its way to production pretty quickly after we had the chance to experience it. Trust us when we say that it has become a go-to source of reading material for many of us!

Making Featured stories even more visible was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re testing an important change that gives publication editors the power to Feature stories to their publication followers. This change is live for many publications today; our goal is to have it available to all publications by the end of the next week.

Each publication will be able to feature stories to their followers. Our system will recommend these stories more highly in Digest emails, on the homepage For You feed, in the publication story page, and anywhere else a publication’s followers see its stories. This gives publication editors a way to use their experience to share the stories they think their readers will find valuable.

Publication editors can feature one story every seven days. If you’re an editor and have more questions about the details of this new feature, we’ve preemptively answered many of them in our help center.

Humans first

We’re building a humans-first platform. This feature is part of our philosophy of building a better internet. Featured Stories are another way that the Medium feed is curated by real humans with subject-matter expertise, not just algorithms.

Medium readers want substance and deeper understanding. It is now common on Medium that the top recommendations for readers have been vetted by at least two humans ahead of you — checking for quality, authenticity, depth, research, impact, and all of the things that make it likely that a story you read here will deepen your understanding of the world. (It’s also this human vetting that does the heroic work of holding back the AI slop from taking over your feeds.)

The bigger picture

When readers come to Medium, we aim to recommend high-quality stories through the human curation that powers our systems. A big part of this is our Boost program, which helps us work directly with publication editors to find great writing across all corners of Medium. More than one million people pay for a Medium membership because they get a reliably great reading experience here.

Our systems are based on human curation because writing is inherently human. That’s what we mean by putting humans first. You write to think and to develop your ideas for readers, not for an algorithm. Reading is just as human. Readers look for good stories in order to better understand the world. When writing is done well — with context, knowledge, and nuance — then a writer’s wisdom passes onto their readers.

But a shared, universal definition of what makes a story good does not exist. Quality is subjective because humans are unique.

Story Featuring is a way to recognize and celebrate the expertise and unique perspectives that editors bring to Medium.

Publications are the heart of community on Medium. Publication editors recognize, curate, and share ideas with their communities. They serve an important role to help connect readers with great writing and help stories find the right audience. Now, they can do that with more power.

At Medium, everything we do connects to humans, from our membership model to our curation systems to our community of readers. What matters isn’t an updated functionality in our product; it’s how you all use these features, and how the stories we all read will change as a result. I used the word test in the introduction of this story because there’s more coming. If you have feedback, we’re listening — leave a response here to share.

Introducing Featured stories for publications was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.