This Is What’s Going To Kill Medium

And that’s why I cancelled my membership

Published in

The Startup

9 min readMar 7, 2019

When I started writing on Medium, over a year ago, I was excited.
Actually, I was more than excited. I was thrilled.
I was motivated. I was encouraged. I was inspired.

I have never been so eager to write.

A passion and a superpower

From early on in my life, people have always asked me for help. Back then, I wasn’t sure whether it was my good advice or my ability to listen that made even complete strangers approach me.

Later on in life, I realized it’s a gift. I actually call it my superpower.
I have a special bond with people. We connect on a deeper level.
Maybe it’s because I have always had this passion to help people.

For several years I tried to find the right way to help as many as people as I can. I wanted to do that more than just occasionally.
So I started writing.
Finding my voice wasn’t an issue because I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
But I still didn’t know how to reach those who needed my help.
I was looking for a platform in which people from all over the world come together to talk about life. People who want to learn, grow, and contribute to a wider discussion.

Then I stumbled upon Medium

I’ve experienced success from the very beginning.
When I say success I mean that I was achieving my goal. The goal that I proudly announced on my profile’s bio — to help people start or continue their self-fulfillment journey.
In just a few months I have gained hundreds of followers and had an increasing amount of viewers and readers. The best reward was that I managed to help thousands of people.

I paid for a membership straight away because I wanted to support Medium.
I believed that the clean, ad-free platform was the way to go.
(I even wrote about it here.)

Most articles I wrote during my first few months on Medium were curated.
I was even given a $100 bonus for one that the curators liked in particular.
My tenth article, Why Having $0 Is Much Better Than Having $1, gained more than 1,000 claps in just a few hours and was amongst the most popular Medium articles that month (March 2018). It also marked my first collaboration with The Startup which is, in my opinion, the best publication here on Medium.

But then something changed.

It was at some point in late 2018. I started having less comments and claps. When I looked at the stats page I was shocked. The number of viewers/readers has dropped significantly.

Some of my articles had less than 100 views in the first 24 hours.
Considering the hundreds of followers I had and the 400K+ followers of The Startup, those were very poor engagement stats.
It basically means my articles had almost no impressions.
And I wasn’t alone. I noticed that many other writers, some with tens of thousands of followers, had barely any claps on some of their new articles.
If you’re a writer on Medium you probably know what I’m talking about.

When I first joined Medium, I used to read at least a couple of interesting articles every day, written by new writers. But in late 2018, I could only find stuff from writers I already followed.
So I decided to reach out to Medium.
Some staff and curators have been in touch with me in the past so I thought they’d love to help.
To my surprise, the answers I received weren’t conclusive. In fact, today I can safely say those were generic responses.
Medium wasn’t ready to handle direct contact or simply didn’t care enough.

I started to notice a pattern.
It wasn’t sudden, but Medium has slowly begun to focus solely on their partner program.
It’s understandable. I was invested in it myself both as a writer and as a reader who owned a membership.
But Medium wasn’t really focusing on the benefits I saw in the partner program — the quality content, the community, and the unique voices.

It’s all about the money

All of the partner program notifications and newsletters Medium has sent me were focused on thing only: money.

Based on member engagement from January (2019):
58.9% of authors or publications who wrote at least one story for members earned money.
8.1% of active authors earned over $100.
$8,390.03 was the most earned by an author, and $4,290.43 was the most earned for a single story.

In this monthly recap there’s no mention of the number of new members or the total amount of readers on Medium. Just money.
By saying that a writer earned $8,390.03 — Medium is sending out a clear message.
It’s kind of like a lottery commercial showing the winner standing by his private pool in his newly bought mansion. After all, every writer’s wet dream is to earn $$$$ by writing what they want to.

But not all writers are here to make money.
Or at least, they don’t prioritize it. Some writers are here to create brand awareness and others like me are simply after exposure.
I would rather have another 1,000 readers to a specific article than to earn another dozen bucks.
Put simply — money isn’t the main incentive for thousands of writers on Medium. Yet, for Medium it is the only one. That’s why they’re effortlessly trying to get writers to “lock” their articles for members only.

What is the aim?

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with the royalty-based model that Medium came up with. In reality, though, there is a lot to fix.
First of all, no one really knows how many members there are on Medium.
We can’t tell if the traffic is growing or decreasing over time. By guessing, it seems that the latter is true.
Secondly, we don’t know how many paid members there are on Medium. That’s crucial because writers deserves to know how much of the profit Medium makes is shared with them. Is it all of it? Is it just half of it?

Like Uber and their drivers or Apple Music and their artists, Medium wouldn’t exist without its writers.
That’s why writers also deserve to know how much they get paid per story and how it is calculated. Stats should state that a writer got paid X amount of money, based on and Y and Z. (Number of claps? Number of readers? Time spent reading the article? Returning readers? Better click-through rate? Publication engagement?)

Without transparency, Medium cannot expect to have writers’ trust or loyalty. Should another competitor start their own platform, one that pays more or has more traffic— why should writers stay on Medium?

No matter how I looked at it, I kept coming back to the realization that Medium’s only aim is to make money. And then some more.
And that’s when I started to feel let down by Medium.

Get curated or get lost

If you’re a writer here on Medium then you probably know that curated articles get about 600 percent more viewers and readers.
That means that if an article doesn’t get curated or featured — it’s pretty much doomed.
Up until recently, there was no way to know whether your articles have been reviewed by a curator. But lately, Medium has contacted me to say they’ll be testing a new feature in which writers will get notified once a curator has reviewed their article. Great.

There’s one catch, though.
Curators will only review articles that are part of Medium’s metered paywall. Put simply — articles that are open to the public will be available only to the writer’s followers. Members-only articles will be the ones reviewed and promoted. This has confirmed the growing trend I feared.
Medium isn’t concerned with quality content. It’s concerned with money.

All writers want their articles to be curated. So it’s safe to assume that sooner or later all articles will be for members-only.
That’s Medium intention, of course. They believe that the more members-only articles they’ll have, the more memberships they’ll sell.
In my opinion, they’re wrong. In fact, this is what’s going to kill Medium.

No value = no membership

Looking into the near future, it’s easy to predict what’s likely to happen.
The only paid members that will remain on Medium will be writers.
And because of the lack of transparency — there’ll be no way to know it.

Much like everyone else, I look for a value before I pay for any service.
As a reader, the only reason I’ll ever pay a monthly subscription to read articles is if those are proven to be quality and if I can’t read them elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe Medium is offering that.

If all articles will be locked, there’ll be mostly writers joining Medium, not readers. Writers who’s incentive is to make money, and nothing but that.
The only thing this will create for sure is an overload of articles.
And not necessarily good ones.
Some will be half-baked and others full of errors.
Naturally, it’ll pull the average quality further down.

That’s exactly why I cancelled my membership.
And I’m afraid most readers will follow suit.
Readers will see right through it and they’ll choose to get their daily read on a different website or directly on their favorite writers’ blogs.

Money > quality content

I have no problem with Medium being profitable. But not at all costs.
Focusing solely on money comes at the cost of quality content.
It kills creativity. It’s really that simple.

I wonder if Medium is turning into another business that is 99 percent passionate about making money and 1 percent passionate about its product.
It takes me back to one of my articles: Is Your Startup A Need Or A Greed?

Medium’s current agenda goes against everything I believe in.
I often write about our money obsession. How it is getting us to act irrationally. How it’s dictating the lives of billions of people.
In fact, my most recent article, We Are Slaves To Money And Then We Die, was exactly about that. Put simply, money is a powerful tool if handled right. But that’s all that it is — a tool. When we idealize money we become slaves to money. We are getting further away from living a fulfilled life.

Ultimately, Medium isn’t really giving writers a choice.
While there are two options there’s one that we simply can’t choose.
It’s either you publish an “open” article and get no new followers or publish a “locked” one and have the chance to be featured.
It’s not fair and it’s not genuine.
It’s not what I believed Medium was all about when I joined.

Give up or give in?

For the benefit of all of us, I hope Medium will listen.
I am still committed to my goal. I am still driven.
And I will continue to help people live a more fulfilled life.

I don’t want to give up on Medium.
But quite frankly, I’m not sure I can continue to contribute to the platform the way that its heading.
In the meantime, while I’m considering my options, I’ll continue working on new self-improvement videos for my Youtube channel: Sign of Life.

There is one way to continue growing the partner program while maintain its quality — limiting the members-only articles.
And it can be done in a few ways.
For example, writers will need to be approved by Medium’s curators or staff before they can join the partner program. This could depend on a number of factors. A few ideas that come to mind — number of followers, high engagement stats, and speciality in a specific field.
Alternatively, Medium’s curators or chosen publications could be the ones to accept submission of specific articles into the members-only section.
This way, paid members will get a value (quality content) and writers will get paid much more.

One last thought.

Whether you are a reader or a writer — I’m not asking you to leave Medium.
But you should speak up, though, if something bothers you.
Don’t forget that every voice counts.
I still remember how inspired I felt when I first watched A Bug’s Life.
Much like those ants, we, the majority, have the power to make a positive change in every aspect of our lives. Even here, on Medium.

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(I’ve pretty much covered my incentive above so you can trust me when I say my content is free and there is no spam, or affiliate offers!)