The Incestuous Nature of Medium
The Medium Partnership program motivates writers to write for writers
When I first started to dig into how to become a content creator, it was very much a slog to dig through all the legitimate tips and tricks from the ones that lure you into thinking they can give you a way out of the 9-to-5 living into the passive income, fast cars, big houses, live how you want without working ploys. The former provides insight into how the industry and the algorithms work so that you can plan your work and start the climb. The latter focuses on selling you a dream in a $50 learning packet that funds the sellers passive income. If you think it sounds like a scam, it is. It’s just a scam that people willingly buy into, and the scammers are smart enough to exploit.
This brings me to Medium.
Medium has dedicated to make itself ad free, which, on the surface, seems like the ideal clean state we wish the internet would adopt. Just solid content from motivated people without an ad in sight. But the problem is, Medium actually does have ads. They are just presented as content.
These are articles from my main feed of recommended readings. Five, back-to-back, articles of writers writing about writing. And this isn’t an anomaly, some odd coincidence. It is the norm. Everyday I get articles about how to make more money writing, how to get more followers on Medium, what writers have learned by writing on Medium. These are ads, just ad for other writers. These are Medium’s equivalent of that $50 learning packet to sell the dream of writing on Medium. And they do it through the same tactics of exploiting the incentivization structure that Medium has chosen as it’s business model.
In order to make money on Medium there are mainly 2 components:
- Join the Partner Program
- Get paid members to read your article
Pretty straightforward right? But there are some heavy caveats. Like this:
The amount a non-member can read in top publications is 3 stories. Per month! Not per day.
