I’m Leaving Medium — Here’s Why
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t intend to write this essay today.
I have freelance client work I should be working on. And I reaaaaaaallllllly need to start being more disciplined about sticking to my own editorial calendar.
But this has been on my mind for a while. The unnecessary mental baggage it’s created is so heavy and I just need to get it off my chest.
I’m done. I’m not publishing on Medium anymore.
I’ve spent months going through the mental gymnastics of this decision. In doing so, I kept looking for justifications to stay.
Maybe my next article will get Boosted.
Maybe I just needed to write more.
Maybe my writing really has gone downhill and I need to do some work.
Maybe I just need to stick it out and keep going.
All of these things are true. I probably should just keep publishing on Medium.
The harsh reality is shoulds don’t pay the bills.
Medium is no longer a viable place for me to write. It’s not producing the ROI on my time that I need it to.
It’s incumbent on me to take my time and talent elsewhere. So that’s what I’ll be doing moving forward.
If you’re a fan of my work, please keep reading.
Tl;dr: I’m moving to Substack. Follow me here.
Medium announced August 2024 was its first profitable month. So far this year my revenue is down 95%.
During Medium Day in August, CEO Tony Stubblebine announced the platform was finally profitable. In a blog post he writes:
All of this money goes to writers. Even as we cut other costs to make Medium profitable, we paid the writers more. (Medium)
Medium is a members-only digital platform. To read — or write — content on Medium, you must subscribe to a membership that costs between $5 to $15 per month.
Medium has 100 million users but only 9,661 of them pay $15 per month for the top-tier Friends of Medium membership. It’s unclear what portion of Medium members are actually readers paying to read content and what portion are paying the compulsory membership fee to try their hand at eeking out a living on the platform.
For me personally, I didn’t start taking Medium seriously until 2022 after this article paid me more than a penny for my thoughts:
It got me thinking that maybe I could try my hand at this writing thing. And for a while it worked.
In June 2023 I decided to publish an article a day for the entire month. By then the new Boost program had gone into effect. Several of my articles were Boosted and for the first time I generated a 4-figure income on the platform.
You can read about that experience here:
Those good times, though, did not last.
In January I had my best month ever earning $3,446.50. It came at a time when one of my primary freelance writing clients went ghost, leaving me with a $3,500 deficit at the start of the year.
A few of my pieces took off and my follower count increased alongside my revenue. I thought I was on the right track.
But a couple of months ago something changed.
My follower count plateaued and my earnings tumbled.
As of this moment, I have 181 articles published in my content library. 47 of those articles have generated revenue this month. Of those 47, just 11 have earned more than $1.
After two years of consistently writing on the platform, I’m back to earning mere pennies for my thoughts.
I keep meticulous records of how much my content earns on Medium. As a writer who publishes her own content and does freelance writing, it’s imperative I have my own data. I need to know what my value is in the market so I can allocate my time correctly.
Over the past few months, my income on Medium has tanked. Instead of earning 4-figures, I’m down to three. At my current rate, I’m projected to earn $183.93 in revenue at the end of the month. This represents a staggering 95% loss in revenue since the start of the year.
For some people, Medium is a hobby. Others are established authors who don’t depend on Medium to earn a living.
For me, writing is a career shift. I’m trying to figure out how this works while keeping a roof over my head. Writing is my livelihood and self-publishing is essential when my freelance work isn’t enough to pay the bills.
Medium is an important part of all of this. It’s not just a place where I literally make money. It’s my entire portfolio. Even if Medium pays me, it’s how I find clients who will.
Ironically, most of my content focuses on economic disruption and the future of work. I’m well aware how rapidly things are changing, especially the future of writing.
I hoped writing on Medium would be a way for me to hone my craft while diversifying my income.
Mr. Stubblebine suggests Medium is paying writers more, but I’ve seen the opposite. Ever since Medium embarked on its quest to privatize the platform and drum up paying subscribers, my revenue has decreased.
It seems I’m not the only one who’s experienced a decline in earnings this year.
I have 10,275 followers on Medium but less than <100 of them are actual readers. My audience isn’t seeing my work so how can they possibly read it?
I had a big surge in followers at the start of the year. Again, I thought this was a signal I was doing something right.
But then in August, something happened and I stopped getting followers. This month is poised to be a record low.
Followers are a vanity metric on social media. But on Medium, I use my follower count to gauge whether or not my work is worth reading.
Under Medium’s distribution model, my followers should see my work in their feed, but with 0.97% of my audience actually reading my work this clearly isn’t happening.
This is a huge problem but not for the reason you probably think.
As a writer, my job is to hone my craft. I’m in this for the long game.
My goal in the next couple of years is to publish a book. The essays I am publishing here are research for that future book.
To become a better writer — one who is capable of writing a book — I need you to read my work.
I need you, the market, to tell me what I’m getting right and what I’m missing. I need people to tell me whenI’m an idiot so I can re-evaluate my assumptions.
If you’re not reading my work — and if you’re not highlighting passages or leaving comments — I have no mechanism for becoming a better writer.
I may have an audience according to Medium but I very clearly don’t have readership.
I can publish new content until I’m blue in the face. If people who have already signaled to me that they want to read my work aren’t seeing my content, then what’s the point?
Medium’s human algorithm — its Boost Program — was supposed to help writers. Instead, it disincentivizes writers from publishing their best work.
On Medium Day this year, Tony Stubblebine argued that Medium is for writers. He claims:
On Medium, we’ve often found that the most interesting writers rarely have the time, or desire, to learn to play the attention-grabbing game. Medium is built differently so that we can find and share these writers with you. Great writing comes from writers who are busy living, not busy hustling. (Medium)
Unfortunately, Medium has ended up doing the very thing it set out not to do. Rather than making writers learn how to grab the attention of readers, Medium writers have to learn how to grab the attention of editors.
The Boost Program is Medium’s attempt at humanizing its algorithm. Instead of letting computers decide what you should read, it taps into a pool of “editors” who have been handpicked to promote content on your behalf.
On the one hand, this is a novel and beneficial solution to automated algorithms. It gives unknown writers a better chance of being discovered.
That being said, it introduces inescapable bias onto the platform that harms writers in the long run.
To my knowledge, there isn’t a public list of who these editors are. There is, however, an unofficial list of Boost-eligible publications you can contribute to, increasing your odds of getting a Boost.
This is the first problem with the Boost Program: it favors publication contributors at the expense of independent writers.
I’m going to be frank, I don’t understand the value of Medium publications. Better Humans is not The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. Getting a piece published in Better Humans may improve my chances of growing an audience and earning a living on Medium, but it isn’t necessarily going to help me build a career as a writer in the long run.
Medium publications have little to no credibility outside of Medium and they don’t compensate writers like traditional publications do. If I pitch an article to The New York Times, I’ll not only get paid for my work, butI’ll get a New York Times byline in the process.
That’s not the case for Medium publications. Sure you might get Boosted, but you also might not. You’ll be asked to do the same amount of work as a traditional media outlet — pitch an article and tailor it to a publication’s editorial standard — for nothing in return.
I don’t see the value proposition of any of this. Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way but if I’m going to invest my time to learn how to write for a publication, it’s going to be a real media outlet with real credibility that employs real editors, not a random publication on Medium.
This mindset, of course, immediately disadvantages me as an independent writer and I take full ownership of that. Because I do not want to play Medium’s publication game, I know that I have fewer Boost and distribution opportunities.
But that isn’t the primary issue with the Boost Program. The other problem is humans are human and they will bring biases into their work. This includes “editors” who are tasked with recommending articles to be Boosted on Medium.
I can write a really great article that resonates with readers. In fact, I’ve written many like this. Here are some of the comments I received from my last piece about why I think reparations is a terrible policy.
The problem is if you’re a Medium editor with Boosting powers and you don’t like my perspective — regardless of how good my writing is — you’re not going to Boost me. And that has material damage to writers.
Boosted articles are compensated at a much higher rate than regular articles. That means you can’t get beyond earnings pennies for your thoughts on Medium unless you are Boosted.
Here’s an example of two articles I published with comparable readership. Look at the earnings from the Boosted article at the top and compare it with the Non-Boosted article at the bottom.
Now look at the Spotify article at the very bottom. 31,000 people read this article compared to 10,700 for my Boosted proof of value at work piece. The Spotify article netted $0.02 per read while the Boosted article earned 7.5X more.
If that Spotify article had been Boosted and earned $0.15 per read, it would have been worth $4,650.
As a writer, this constantly weighs on me. I hope an article will be Boosted but I know it might not be. I feel like instead of writing good content, I’m busy playing the Boost lottery.
Contrary to what Mr. Stubblebine said on Medium Day, Medium doesn’t encourage good, high-quality work, it incentivizes volume. The more pieces you publish the more opportunities you get to play the Boost game.
The goal then, isn’t to provide content members want to read, it’s to write content editors want to Boost.
And that right there is a fundamental problem. This introduces self-censorship into Medium’s human algorithm. If an editor doesn’t agree with your perspective on something — like this piece highlighting the unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement — they’re not going to Boost it on the platform.
If your content isn’t being shown to your followers and there’s no equitable way to get paid for Non-Boosted content then what’s the point of Medium?
Instead of being a place for writers to thrive, Medium increasingly feels like a high school clique for publication editors. Just like every other platform on the internet, you either play your game or you don’t. Medium isn’t an exception to the rule.
Medium articles are paywalled. If I’m not gaining readers or being compensated for my work, Medium is exploiting my talent to drive up memberships — and its own profitability.
Medium prides itself on being an ad-free platform. Let’s not beat around the bush, that’s a really difficult business model to pull off.
In lieu of ads, Medium sells memberships to content that’s paywalled on the platform. Before you can read articles you’ll be asked to create a membership. This makes Medium a user-unfriendly platform.
As a writer who wants to get paid for her work, I support paywalling content. But as a writer who is clearly not getting paid on Medium, I need to leverage my content library for writing opportunities off the platform. Medium makes this incredibly difficult for me to do.
My Medium essays rank on Google. A large portion of readers for that piece I wrote about the #MeToo movement came from Google.
Medium used to have a referral program where writers could earn supplemental revenue by recruiting readers to sign up for memberships. They got rid of that last year.
Now articles like this are generating traffic from Google and likely bringing new readers to the platform. But because Medium doesn’t compensate for external referral traffic, I don’t earn a cent from any of it.
While it’s true I control whether or not my articles are paywalled on the platform it’s not as black and white as it seems. If I don’t paywall my content, I’m not eligible for the Medium Partner Program. If I do paywall my content, I get a piece from the Medium pie but as I showed above, it’s a sliver of a crumb at best.
If Medium isn’t helping me as a writer and it isn’t compensating me for my work, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m better off moving to a platform that gives me more control over how the paywall is applied.
That’s why I’ll be publishing on Substack from here on out.
I can’t in good faith continue publishing on Medium where editorial bias governs distribution and compensation. Here’s where you can read my work moving forward.
As I’ve watched my readership tank and my earrings nose dive, I’ve tried to find rational justifications for staying on Medium.
Maybe I’m the problem and I need to take a chill pill.
But the more I publish the more I’m starting to think that maybe Medium is the problem.
I started seeing my performance decline after I began publishing more social commentary on the platform. The more I flirted with politically incorrect topics, the more I saw my performance decline.
Yes, it’s possible my writing has gone downhill and no one cares what I have to say. But it’s also possible I’ve run up against editorial biases that equally don’t want to hear what I have to say.
Here’s an example. I wrote this piece back in August defending Ballerina Farm. In it, I make the case for why I think Hannah Neeleman is a #girlboss that modern women should look up to:
Neeleman isn’t advocating for policy changes or leading protests demanding that employers do more. Instead, she created a career for herself that fits comfortably alongside her duties as a mother and wife. Hannah did what Anne-Marie Slaughter said was impossible for women to do.
It’s not offensive but it certainly doesn’t support the prevailing feminist narrative. It challenges the assumption that raising your own children is somehow a concession to the patriarchy.
When you search ‘Ballerina Farm’ in Medium, it’s clear Medium supports pro-feminist content. The top two pieces shown in the results don’t offer a unique perspective. They parrot the same feminist talking points on oppression.
I still can’t wrap my head around how having children and making them a homemade lunch from scratch — while running multiple businesses — is a cautionary tale Medium readers should be warned about, but I digress.
Based on the clap count for these articles, it’s likely they’ve been Boosted on the platform or at minimum, actually been distributed to the author’s followers.
From anecdotal conversations I’ve had with individuals who use Medium, it’s clear that the content they're being shown is content that adheres to a particular ideological bend.
If you poke around you might notice that Medium doesn’t have a lot of conservative or contrarian writers on its platform. Why is that?
How is it that a platform that promotes human-centered writing has an abundance of certain types of content but a dearth of content that offers an opposing viewpoint?
Maybe that’s by design.
It’s abundantly clear that if you aren’t writing in agreement with the current zeitgeist you’re not going to be distributed or compensated on the platform. Despite its protests to the contrary, Medium simply does not want your voice to be heard.
This creates an undeniable echo chamber. How can I — or any other writer — become better at my craft — and become a better human — if the people who disagree with me aren’t engaging with my content?
The answer is obvious: I can’t. And in the process, a culture of self-censorship will continue to grow with platforms like Medium at the helm.
Until Medium can put a check on its inherent editorial biases, it will be a platform of low-value content and suppressed speech.
I don’t want to be part of that.
That’s why I’ve decided to move my entire content library to Substack.
Here’s where you can find me going forward:
For my work on the economy, the future of work, and changing political and social norms, you can find me at Tomorrow Today.
Check out Tomorrow Today here.
For essays on productivity, you can find me on Productivity Stack.
Check out Productivity Stack here.
And for essays on how to become a better adult in the 21st century, you can find me at Modern Adult.
Please subscribe to me on Substack if you’d like to continue following my work.
One last thought for those of you who are reading this and who have been following me for a while: I appreciate you more than you know. It’s because of you I’ve been able to find my way in this world as a writer.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
See you on Substack,
Amanda
P.S. If you’re a writer who resonates with some of the things I’ve shared here, will you leave a comment? I don’t know how systemic these problems are, but I’d love to know if you’ve had a similar experience.