Insights on the New Earning Metrics of Medium
Thoughts, plans, and whatnot
It’s a few minutes passed midnight here in Manila, and I’m having a hard time sleeping due to the long nap I took this afternoon. Being in the bank all morning really exhausts a 23-year-old.
You probably know about this by now if you’ve been to any Medium Facebook groups or have read the e-mail Medium sent earlier — there’s a new earning metrics in town!
If you haven’t seen the e-mail here’s a snippet of it:
and also, there’s a whole 5-minute blog post about it by Medium.
Being in a third world country, my earnings on Medium helps a great deal in terms of my bills, even pays for my boba milk tea addiction.
I’m not really sure how I feel about all the changes but I figured I’ll write about them as a way to structure my thoughts.
Reading Time as the Primary source of our Earnings
I’ve always measured how one of my articles on Medium based on the number of fans. I even have a number of fans set on a Medium article before I publish a new one.
My read time for almost every article I publish except for poetry is 4 minutes, now I’m thinking with the new earning metric to push that up to 5 or 6 minutes.
The con of that is most readers on Medium, I believe, are scanners. Would they really read a 5–6 minute spew of words from my brain? Or is it better to keep it short?
Do Claps Matter Less?
The blog post Medium published stated that instead of paying based on claps as the main signal, they will now reward stories primarily based on reading time, which they’ve seen to be a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers.
So, of course, they matter less now.
Claps, even at the start of my Medium endeavor, seem like a vanity shtick to me. I know, I know, you disagree. It does help with the earnings. This is just me.
The Medium lords also stated that, “claps will remain a great way for readers to support stories they love. When your readers clap, they’ll boost your stories to a wider audience. And as more people read, you’ll earn.” So I guess it’s still best to show love to our fellow writers.
Converting non-Members to join our little cult
Now this I like. Medium will also include in our earnings a converted member’s reading time if they have read one of our pieces within thirty days.
Sounds like good deal to me.
We all now this was done primarily for the benefit of Medium and not the writers. They want or need more paying members and I have nothing against that.
In fact, I’m glad to help. Medium is a good community for writers regardless of what negativity others are spreading.
This means if we get a good number of outside readers, chances are one of them will sign up. This is particularly useful to people who already have a huge following outside of Medium.
I guess ranking in Google helps too, that means SEO might come in handy. Although that might defeat the purpose of the freedom Medium gives to writers.
Daily Updates of our Earnings
No more Wednesday doomsday for everyone who’s excited or nervous whenever the earnings day comes!
I personally like this, this can give myself and other writers the chance to strategize based on our daily earnings.
Now I can see how bad I’m doing per day and maybe that will get my ass to write a couple of more articles or maybe even give me a reason to slack off a little bit if I had, for example, a good week.
Overall, I think the new Medium update is okay but we’ll never know until the end of November I guess.
I’ve heard a few writers proposing something similar to this and I think the Medium gods heard them. I think this is a win-win for both Medium and it’s writers.
