SOMETHING’S WRONG
Can Anyone Explain WTF Is Going on With Medium?
My “Read” stats vs. payouts are wildly inconsistent
I have been writing on this platform for several years now, and I continue to be mystified by the partner program payment algorithm. I’m always delighted when people read my outpourings, rants, tall tales, and whatever ramblings I put out there, but one of the reasons I joined Medium was to get paid when folks enjoy what I write.
It is my understanding that the Medium algorithm uses the number of reads and the length of the article as measures of “value.” But no matter what I write, how long the piece is, or how popular it is, there’s no way to predict the payout.
I suppose the parameters the algorithm chews on must be kept secret so that writers don’t try to game the system by writing for the algorithm. And that’s perfectly fine with me. But when good writing gets a ton of reads, yet pays essentially nothing, that’s not fine with me.
The two examples below illustrate my confusion:
Let’s break it down even further. If we take the total earnings for a story and divide by “read-minutes”—the number of reads times the number of minutes per read—we get a dollar value per read-minute. This is relatable to the total number of…
