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Do Boosted Stories Earn Too Much?
Why Medium might want to re-think their Boost criteria
I don’t always write about Medium (in fact I almost never write about Medium), but when I do, I prefer to write data-centric articles that help users better understand the platform.
If you’re part of the Medium Partner Program, then you know about getting Boosted. Medium’s curators identify articles they think audiences will find interesting, entertaining, or otherwise valuable, and they “Boost” them, thus making the articles more visible to a wider range of readers.
Obviously, a Boosted article is going to earn more than it would have if it hadn’t been Boosted, since earnings are in large part determined by the number of views, reads, and time spent reading. But as we’ll see, even if you hold these things constant, a Boosted article earns a lot more than an un-Boosted one.
Nevertheless, if we consider different ways of measuring how “interesting” or “engaging” an article is — such as read ratio, number of claps per read, or number of comments per read — Boosted articles aren’t really that much more interesting or engaging than un-Boosted ones. This surprising finding calls into question the wisdom of giving Boosted articles such a large earnings premium.