In 2017, Medium rolled out their “Partner Program.”
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I already had like 10,000 followers at that point, and I remember being VERY leery to “lock” posts behind a paywall.
It felt dirty.
But I got used to it and started locking all my posts after mid-2018 rolled around. It worked, too. I made over $50,000 with the Partner Program alone since 2018, and heard stories of other authors making $10,000+ per month sometimes.
Because of all this “success,” I never really thought twice about Medium’s core business plan. I thought they were doing just fine if they had all that money to dole out to people.
BUT recently, I’m starting to wonder if this business plan never ACTUALLY worked, still doesn’t work now, and ruined Medium in the process.
Let me explain why.
Medium Tried To Copy Youtube’s Algorithm, But It Didn’t Work
runs the Solo Club here on Substack. He wrote something in a recent newsletter that absolutely fascinated me:“I just fundamentally disagree with Medium’s approach to delivering content. For me, an algorithmic system which removes human error, inconsistency, and subjectivity works. This is what YouTube does, and it delivers the right content at the right time to the right people. Sometimes it gets it wrong - but it learns, and, most importantly, it’s predictable.
When I questioned Tony about this, he explained that the YouTube approach doesn’t work for Medium. "For 12 months we lost subscribers and the better we got at recommending stories people wanted to read the more subscribers we lost,” he said.
Hearing this is like somebody telling you the sky has actually been green this whole time.
So, an algorithm that functioned much like Youtube’s resulted in less subscribers for Medium over time?
One explanation I can give for this one is that 99% of Youtube’s content isn’t locked behind a paywall like Medium’s is.
I mean, let’s say Medium had an algorithm so good that it made you read 3 locked stories IN A ROW in a matter of 10 minutes.
Well, now you’re shit outta luck and need to PAY UP to read more.
But who’s going to pay a platform that they were introduced to like 10 minutes ago?
Nobody.
So, yeah, I can kinda see why they lost subscribers.
But what about the people who cancelled their memberships with the new changes?
I’m sorry, you’ll never convince me that giving people more of what they want makes them quit a platform. Tony and company either didn’t have as good of an algorithm as they thought, or there were other market factors that contributed to the decline, like..
Maybe People Don’t Want To Pay To Read Stuff
GASP! I just blasphemied all over the place.
Look. We live in a world where a Disney+ or Netflix subscription is a few hairs over $5 per month.
Us Medium writers are competing with Squid Game, Bridgerton, and freaking Gal Gadot for attention. Did you really think that a bunch of words on a page written by a 10th grade science teacher are going to win out against watching Gal Gadot trot around the globe killing bad guys in a $100+ million movie?
The answer is no.
And no offense to science teachers. I’m not any more interesting than they are.
I’m just telling you the truth.
I had significant doubts back in 2018 that I’d make any real money from Medium’s Partner Program. I just didn’t see why people would pay for a Medium Subscription. Me? I never used mine, really. I just paid the $5 to support Medium.
Whenever my Mom sends me a NY Times article I have to pay to read, I roll my eyes and click out. I don’t care if the headline says “READ THIS IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE.” I’m not reading.
Sure, ads are a freaking hassle. I HATE ads. But guess what?
I still go to my favorite cooking blog despite the fact that 50 ads pop up in my face immediately EVERY TIME.
I don’t care.
The minor inconvenience of seeing an ad for Charmin Ultra isn’t as bad as pulling out my credit card and paying a subscription fee to NOT see it.
I take the path of least resistance, and that path looks like me pressing the X button in the top right of an ad after 5 seconds.
Every time.
Youtube would get destroyed if they decided to lock all their videos behind a paywall. It would be a bloodbath. And I see creators making videos that are 2 hours long breaking down why Spider-Man 2 on PS2 is the greatest game ever made.
I love this crap.
Doesn’t matter, though.
I still won’t pay $5 for it.
Maybe the Subscription model isn’t the answer anymore.
Medium’s operating under the false assumption that if they only had BETTER ARTICLES and BETTER WRITERS that people would pay the subscription fee.
So for the last 12 months, they’ve dedicated all their resources towards bolstering quality. With the boost. By waging war against clickbait. With author badges.
The problem is, they already tried this and it failed.
Ev had to lay off a bunch of people in early 2021 because project “HIRE EDITORS AND WRITERS FROM OTHER MAJOR NEWS OUTLETS TO COME MAKE EXCLUSIVE CONTENT FOR MEDIUM” failed.
It failed.
It didn’t drive revenue in the way they’d hoped.
So here’s a question: If professional writers and editors who worked at some of the most prestigious news outlets in America couldn’t entice people to subscribe to Medium at a profitable clip, what makes you think you can?
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but the pill exists nonetheless.
It doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer. It doesn’t mean your writing isn’t awesome or worthy of attention. It’s just that people won’t pay to read it at a sufficient clip for it to be profitable for platforms like Medium.
So where does that leave Substack?
This platform seems to be doing pretty well under the subscription model, right?
Well, some news outlets would beg to differ, but it makes sense that they’d beg to differ, seeing how Substack is a huge threat to them.
I’d simply say that for Substack, it’s different.
You can lock all types of content behind a paywall here, not just writing. You can lock videos and podcasts behind a paywall. I’m thinking about locking my course material behind the paywall here to drive paid subscribers.
Monetization is done WAY better on Substack for both the creator and the consumer.
There’s more reasons to pull out that credit card.
And a lot of people eventually DO.
Not to mention you can subscribe directly to one writer to support them more instead of subscribing to all of Medium, which is like paying $400 for an NBA ticket to see one player.
Maybe Medium’s Focus On Paying Writers Drew The Wrong “Writers”
Medium’s full of marketers masquerading as writers.
Any time you create a place where people can make money, hoards will naturally gather seeking their pound of flesh.
I can’t tell you how many people took my Medium course teaching them how to make $500 per month and never wrote 1 article.
It’s because they weren’t writers. They were marketers or folks in search for internet gold. They didn’t care about writing. If they did, they would’ve written something!
Here on Substack, writers make money, but it’s nothing to really write home about if you don’t already have your own products and such.
On Medium, you can make good money on Day 1 if you get boosted. All these writers are following the money. That’s why we see so many writers writing about Medium over there. It gets views and it pays them well.
There’s upsides to this, but the downside is whatever Medium deems “good content” will win, and everybody will jump on the bandwagon to write only that kind of stuff.
There’s so many “writers” I see on Medium who aren’t actually writers. They would never post something online if they knew they wouldn’t make money from it eventually. Substack might just be the better place because it’s a bunch of creators who actually like creating and have “getting paid” as their secondary reason for being here.
These are just a few ideas I have about why Medium failed.
What do you think?
What I noticed is that Medium quickly was overrun by people trying to game the system or people writing about how to game the system.
Why would anyone pay $5 for that unless you want to game the system.
It becomes an pyramid scheme without solid base.
A couple points here:
Medium absolutely attracted the wrong sort of writers--at least in the last 2-3 years. Too many were there to make money first, and write second. I'm 100% for writers being paid for their work, but when the expectation is that you can throw anything up and just watch the cash roll in, something is broken. It had all the energy of a late-stage goldrush. Too many people hoping to find riches in the nches and waaaay too many people that had heard the parable about selling axes instead. If I had a nickel for every fomulaic "wellness" or "productivity" piece I had clogging my feed, we could both retire right now.
Oh, you want to tell me about getting up at 5 AM or the Eisenhower Matrix? Cool.
The "big" writers didn't pay off the way Ev thought they might because A) they didn't post that often, and B) by and large you could see their work elsewhere.
Substack works because (IMO) people are paying both for direct access to a writer, but also to support that writer's project. There are a few writers on Medium, who if they moved here, I'd pay to read for those same reasons. I would not pay to do that on Medium simply because I don't want to wade through 50 other articles to get there first --and tbh, I don't have to. The model is set up so I can read everything for "free," as opposed to paying $5-6/mo. directly to the same author on here.
Speaking of money; I think the awkward reality is that someone, somewhere LOVED those meta articles. We all said we hated them, but they all showed up in our feeds time & again. And they got claps. And apparently paid decently, despite going against Mediums MPP policies.
I always thought that selling an ad-free experience would drives subscription, but they have doubled/tripled down on not having any, so...