How Medium Pays Its Writers in 2024
Discovering the mechanics behind the elusive way Medium measures how much and how long your readers stay on your article was a complete and total accident.
For those of us who’re midnight readers, the dark theme and options to make your screen dark are important for ease of reading. Kindle got me hooked on their black pages with white text, and it’s the perfect formula to limit the amount of irritating light directed at my eyes so I could actually fall asleep reading on an electronic device.
Not only do I use a dark browser theme for Chrome, but I also use an extension that allows me to toggle between dark and light on a webpage which is exactly what led me to discover the little feature that Medium uses to determine how much of the words on a screen are consumed by your readers.
Watch how the bar becomes an element that the chrome extension darkens as it passes over text and images on my screen…
You’ll also notice that the images are not scanned by the bar, it skips right over so if you have posts that are only one image or many images, and you’re assuming that Medium is paying you by the time your readers spend on your article, this proves it to be entirely wrong. Clearly, the mechanics of this code is to specifically measure the text that scrolls on a page eliminating any images that appear on my screen.
I personally have not used many images outside of my featured image nor have had the thought of an instance where creating a quote or statement in an image would benefit my writing. Medium strips out metadata of our images so with that, the ability to use them to establish SEO flew out the window. Although elegant memes would defiantly be something that could be used to saturate your blog’s theme and be more easily found in Medium searches.
Case point: download this image and check out the title
There you have it, my fellow Medium authors, I hope this bit of intel helps you format your work in a way that brings you millions of readers. Do you have a tip or trick to add? Let the readers know in the comments!
