Is it Just Me or Is Medium Weird?
A bit of a rant about things that make you go hmmm
There are some great things about Medium, but there are also some things that really leave me scratching my head.
Curation
Curation puzzles a lot of people, including me. I write a lot about mental health, so mental health is the one topic page that I look at regularly. And you know what? A decent number of the curated picks have a pretty tenuous connection to mental health. So why are they curated in mental health? It’s not as though there isn’t a ton of quality mental health writing happening on Medium.
I found it odd that a post I did recently on how intersectionality affects experiences of mental illness and mental health care was curated in the equality topic, but not mental health, which it was primarily about. Um, okay…
Bots
There seem to be a lot of bot accounts on Medium. They have names that aren’t actually real names. They have a few posts that sound awkward and probably bot-written, yet they get more claps than I do. Seriously?
Non-clappers
I seldom look at my stats, so sometimes it takes me a while to notice trends. Maybe it’s just me, but Medium appears to have a substantial number of non-clappers. Here are a few of my stats:
- 681 views/230 reads/13 fans (6% of readers clapped)
- 149/88/8 (9% clapped)
- 902/505/38 (7% clapped)
- 233/166/2 (1% clapped)
- 261/111/1 (1% clapped)
I can understand why reads are smaller than views. But it’s hard not to get a bit of a complex when 99% of the people that persisted with reading to the end of your post didn’t feel inclined to leave even a single clap. Why bother reading to the end if you don’t like it? And if you do like it, why the aversion to clicking on the clap button?
I decided to look around and see if this is a thing for other people, and apparently it is, based on this article by Roz Warren.
Totally aside from the fact that we’re paid based on claps, it just doesn’t make Medium feel like such a nice place when vast hordes of people (with maybe a few bots thrown in there as well) with a strong aversion to clapping. Isn’t it nicer for everyone to be nice?
MPP earnings
According to Medium, the top earners in the Medium Partner Program over the last couple of months have earned around $20K. That’s a hefty chunk o’ change.
Only 57% of active writers make any money at all, and only between 7–8% of writers make over $100. That’s a pretty big spread when some people are on track to earn six figures in a year while the vast majority of writers make under $100 a month.
Given that the pot of membership fees is finite, the percentage of people edging past that $100 mark isn’t likely to change much when you’ve got people earning in the $20K range.
Maybe Medium wants to be a place where people can make $200K+ per year (extrapolating from $20K/month), and that’s up to them. Personally I think it would be nicer to have a platform where more people are able to do okay. That may even help with retaining current members and attracting new members.
I’m not begrudging anyone the right to earn a good income from their writing. What I’d like to see is changes to the Medium algorithm so that earnings above, say, $10K per month accumulate at a slower rate than earnings under $10K. Maybe this would give more than 7–8% of writers a chance to earn over $100.
Posting about earnings of Medium
Of course, everywhere you turn there’s an article about how to make $XXXX a month to remind the vast majority of people making $X or $XX that they’re really not so good.
I’m very much in agreement with Jenny Justice on this issue.
I’m not sure if those posts are genuinely meant to be helpful, but given that 92% are still earning less than $100, I’m guessing that they’re not helpful in practice.
Okay then, now that I’ve got that out of my system, it’s off to write another article that 99% of readers won’t clap for! Onwards and upwards!
