Dear Medium, Your New Partner Program Sucks
Back in August, Medium changed its Partner Program. For those of you who don’t write on Medium, the Partner Program is how writers like me are compensated. It’s what makes Medium a platform that’s worth dedicating time to publish on.
According to a July post by Medium’s head product manager, Buster Benson, the goal of the new program is to:
Tell your story rather than churn out content. Take the time to go deeper, research longer, edit more. We will always be shifting our payment and distribution incentives for this type of writing.
Makes sense. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with wanting writers to write better content. There is, however, a problem with calculating compensation for writing based on esoteric qualitative value metrics that aren’t actually measurable.
Writers used to be compensated based on readership. This is a model that digital ad platforms, like Google, use to compensate content creators elsewhere on the internet. The more eyeballs you get, the more likely it will lead to clicks. The more clicks you get and the amount of time a reader spends reading your content, the more valuable it is. Valuable content under this model is discerned by readership and compensated accordingly.
