Why Medium’s New Referral Program is Total Dumpster Fire
And what you should do instead
I was just as excited as you. Here, we writers have a new income stream we can add to our Medium content. At first I was really excited with the sample numbers floating-around. All we need is a handful of new subscribers (about $2 a person in affiliate commission) and we’d make a steady stream of income every month no matter how well our stories do.
So far, so good.
But the actual numbers just don’t happen.
Plus, I haven’t seen any articles from writers sharing their stats on new sign-ups (or how they’ve made hundreds of dollars etc.). For the most part this whole program has been crickets.
I wanted to know what we can really expect from this, so I ran an experiment.
Since I’m a mid-level writer here on Medium, I’ve got a good-sized audience. Not giant, but not tiny. I’ve got 12.6 thousand followers and a steady stream of traffic every day to my stories.
I added the affiliate link to the bottom of 50 stories. Some of those stories are my most-popular and get plenty of outside, non-Medium, Googly traffic. I ran this experiment for three weeks.
And how many new, referred subscribers did I earn in this time?
