Member-only story
My Experience with the Medium Partner Program
Memos on Medium: Medium Focuses Too Much on Internal Users
Medium is a shell of what it could be, and an even greater shell of what it once was. It’s hardly evolved as a platform, much less, it only took away some of its best features.
Medium’s lack of organic reads and external click make the platform hard to recommend. And they’re not very clear on what generates revenue for readers either. Even if the information is present somewhere, it’s not publicly known.
I haven’t been writing on Medium for long, but it’s a platform that doesn’t seem to reward much effort or consistency aside from writing articles that fit the current algorithm, which mainly favors click bait reads about earning Medium based revenue.
The Medium subscriber and reader based is quite niche, and so the site’s business model for Medium Partner Program members follows more of a pyramid scheme, hence only writers who’ve earned top spots are more likely to earn better.
This model pushes away new people from wanting to sign up and commit to the site. But this is where their shady earnings incentive comes in, for which the process is annoying too — like who even uses Stripe compared to multiple more accessible means.
