Medium Is Starting to Concern Me. A Lot.

Is Medium dying? Worrying about my favorite platform.

I absolutely love Medium, and if you’ve followed my writing on Side Hustle Road or on Medium you know just how much I’ve enjoyed writing for that platform. Since May of 2022, I’ve earned several thousand dollars just from the Medium Partner Program, and I’ve truly loved interacting with other writers in and outside of my niche.

But as it stands, I have some serious concerns about Medium’s future.

I’ve written previously about just how unwise I think it is to put all our eggs in one basket, and I strongly believe that it’s important to own a platform - at least one - so that you have something to fall back on in case you need to. But I had hoped that Medium would be around long term.

And to be clear, it still may, but I’m a bit discouraged.

Medium remains a place where writers can publish just about anything within reason, and as a blog-ish kind of platform, it works.

But recent changes to the Medium Partner Program have made it all but a worthless time investment for writers looking to grow an income. And that truly makes me sad.

I wrote on Side Hustle Road about some of these changes, and while I understand and support the majority of these changes, what Medium has done to the Partner Program has drastically reduced just how much writers are likely to make from the platform - outside of affiliate links and promotion of their own products, that is.

Mark Ellis

writes in a recent post: “After the changes Medium has made to its approach to content delivery and Partner Program payouts, I’ll be lucky if I hit $500 per month and my audience growth has slowed to a crawl.” And perhaps more depressingly, he says: “Over the last few months, my audience on Medium has gradually been pulled away, engagement has dropped to practically zero, and, overnight, my earnings have been slashed. I suddenly feel like an outcast and as though my writing is no longer good enough for Medium.”

Same here, Mark. Same here.

Mark currently has 18.8K followers on Medium. I’m sitting at 1.3K personally.

And if someone who has 14.46 times the following I do doubts he’ll make over $500 a month, where does that put small fish like me?

Very discouraging.

Jakub Jirák

wrote in a reply to a comment by Mark on Medium that “the new medium partner program moves it to the next level from regular income to nothing overnight.”

Indeed. Seems that way.

And I’ve read similar stories from others in the tech niche on Medium. Tech content is very hit or miss there. Sometimes our content gets boosted. Other times Medium seems to hardly know it exists.

And as Mark points out, if our content does get boosted, we never really know why. It’s like a lottery - but none of us really knows the rules.

So where do we go from here?

That’s the question. My income from writing online over the past year has been centered squarely on Medium. And, again, while I absolutely believe that we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in one basket and should be platform independent, it’s always sad to see a platform crumble.

For months now, I’ve had in the back of my mind this sneaking feeling that Medium is too good to be true. And maybe it is. Maybe the golden era of the Medium Partner Program is over Maybe this is just temporary.

Either way, it’s very disheartening.

For now, my game plan is going to be pretty much what it has been - just doubled down:

1. I want to be diligent about promoting and supporting other content creators - especially those in my niche.

2. I will be investing far more time and energy in platforms like Substack and my own websites.

3. In the very near future, I’m hoping to get back into freelance marketing as I’ve done in the past. I haven’t done much of that since 2020, and I miss it. I think it’s time to bring it back.

But what about you? What will you do?

To be clear, I’m not giving up on Medium, and I do hope that things will change in the future. I hope that Tony and the rest of Medium’s leadership will realize just how negative these changes are for those of us who want to create content for the platform but have a hard time justifying the time cost if the return on investment is so low.

I can hope. Will anything change? I don’t know.

But I do hope.