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The Medium Partner Program Is A Complete Mess In 2025
The unbelievable, steady decline of a beloved side hustle.
Even though it never had the potential to pay off a mortgage (at least for 99.9% of writers), Medium holds a special place in my heart because of its ease of entry, and how consistently it seemed to value high quality content.
Something changed in 2024. As many would notice, the reads just didn’t pay as much. It became progressively more difficult to go viral, and every update on the algorithm seemed to be aimed at the explicit goal of extracting as much monetary value out of both the readers and writers on the platform as possible.
There were a few winners, and many, many more losers. I’ve noticed a massive exodus of great authors from this platform, simply because, in their own words, they didn’t see the economic benefit of writing on the platform anymore.
At the time, I thought I’d just weather the storm to see the general direction that Medium is going in, and how to best serve my audience.
To be honest, after looking at the state of things right now, I find it difficult to motivate myself to keep an account here, and even more difficult to justify the time expenditure required to grow a readership.
Right now, mostly due to being busy on other projects, I only have 2,500 views so far. In the past, this would have netted me anywhere between $60 to $120 (on the low end). That would have been a great, little passive income stream!
However, guess what the extremely embarrassing grand total *actually* is today:
Yup…a measly $15.
It’s highway robbery. So low, it’s actually a bit insulting. These stats are below Adsense’s levels of pay…..and they don’t require a paywall in order to serve content!
My earnings would have been $13, by the way, if it wasn’t for an extremely loyal, referred reader that has been on my account for nearly 2 years.
I’m not the only one complaining either. It seems like quite a number of people…
