I Switched A Viral Free Article To Member Only, Here’s What Happened
How readers fluctuated, how much it earned and more.
Recently one of my old but popular articles had a resurgence of traffic. I was getting more views/reads/claps the whole lot. I clicked on the stats page and had a glance at when it started.
Most new hits had come in from internal referrals. Medium curators had distributed my article in Productivity and Self (which I was very appreciative of). Meaning, my article was now showing up in the Medium digest, the app, and other places.
Being the curious guy I am, I had a lot of questions. Skipping over all the boring ones, let’s focus on ones related to the Medium Partner Program.
I wanted to know what would happen if I switched a currently ‘trending’ article to paid.
When I had written the article, it immediately became quite popular. I had published it to The Startup but back then, and someone can correct me here if I’m wrong, you couldn’t publish paid articles to publications. But this had changed since.
