Is Medium Becoming Boost or Bust?

The earnings model has changed, here's what I've experienced

Hello everyone!

Yesterday I participated in Medium Day. Leading up to the event, I was having trouble with my webcam. My computer would periodically “detect it” and then “not detect it.” I fixed this by plugging the cable into a new port and restarting the computer.

Speaking of that, when computers first started being sold as “things people can have at home” instead of “things that take up a whole room at NASA” they used to have an on/off switch. You’d just turn them off light a light.

Click!

This was before we had computers with hard drives. Later, computers with hard drives showed up and you had to float a cursor over to an icon and “ask permission” to turn the computer off. I remember we felt resentful about this. Sometimes the computer wouldn’t let you turn it off, so we’d unplug it.

“I’ll show you stupid computer. You’ll go off when I say you’ll go off!”

Then we couldn’t figure out why the dumb thing wouldn’t boot back up when we plugged it back in.

Grrr.

The only thing that’s changed is that now I’ve been conditioned to wait until the computer turns off when it wants. Still, my main tactic for “fixing” things is to repeatedly turn things off and on.

Medium day!

I finally got my mic and my camera working correctly, so I just left the session running for about an hour until it was my time to talk. That’s probably not the way you’re supposed to do things, but I hate having moments of panic, particularly when I’m supposed to be speaking and my webcam doesn’t work.

Whenever technology miraculously starts to function as it’s supposed to, I shout, “DON’T DO ANYTHING! DON’T TOUCH IT!”

I thought the talk went pretty well, but I couldn’t find the button to show me questions from the audience. If I’d have stopped and looked for thirty seconds, I’m sure it would have been obvious. However, I didn’t want the dead air time. I eventually found the questions with about 2 minutes left to go in the talk... oh well.

If I get invited back I’ll do better next time, assuming I can get my mic and camera to work.

Questions about boost

I came away with the impression that boost is still the biggest area of concern for people who are interested in Medium. It had been my intention to assure everyone that Medium is not “boost or bust” because the story I published in the Writing Cooperative has been performing really well and it wasn’t boosted.

However... Medium rolled out its new stats page on Saturday, and lo and behold I discovered that my Writing Cooperative story from Monday was, in fact, boosted. The little box labeled “boosted” doesn’t appear on the stats, but there’s a circular icon next to the title.

My read ratio is still only 32%. I just did an article about read ratio. I think if you write complex articles at an 8^th grade reading level, your read ratio plummets.

To get a high read ratio.

You must write.

Short...

Sen...

ten...

ces...

Once people start scrolling, you want to speed them up so they get to the end. They aren’t really reading, they’re sort of playing a video game. It defeats the whole purpose of writing, I know.

Anyway, the cornerstone of my argument that Medium is not boost or bust was the performance of that one article. Now that I see it was boosted, my argument has evaporated.

Does that mean I’m ready to conclude that Medium IS boost or bust?

Well... not really.

I went back and looked at my statistics from a couple years back. It seemed like, on average, you’d get paid a little over a dollar for an hour of read time. So, if you had 50 hours of read time, you’d get paid $55 or so.

The last time I looked, an article with 50 hours of read time was earning about $45. Unfortunately, I can’t verify this anymore because the stats page no longer shows read time. Now we see things like views, claps, and responses.

This is going to take some getting used to.

The big difference is that stories that get boosted earn HUGE.

Boosted articles this month

Here are the stats for my 3 boosted articles this month:

1. The Platform That Offers the Most Innovative Tools Will Attract the Best Writers

   In The Writing Cooperative

   View stats: 5K claps 116 responses $516

2. 15 Years Ago, I Wouldn’t Have Liked the Barbie Movie

   In Fanfare

   View stats: 3.1K claps 54 responses $314

3. Apologies and Reparations Aren’t Enough

   In AfroSapiophile

   View stats: 2K claps 48 responses $170

The good news is that I HAVE had a couple articles earn well that weren’t boosted.

• Confederates Are American Nazis

  In An Injustice!

  View stats: 2.5K claps 46 responses $48

Keep writing, good things will happen

My plan is always to try and write 30 articles a month. If they average $30 each, that’s $900 (plus whatever I get from my old stories). With a few boosts, you can do much better.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that quality comes from writing every day. I use the same process on every article, some of them get attention, some don’t. Often, articles that I think are a cut above end up languishing, and articles that I don’t think are as good end up launched into the stratosphere.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m shooting in the same place and the target keeps moving, or if there’s more variance in my work than I recognize.

I’m likely to have my best ever month on Medium in August, and this will make the third straight month where I’ve broken my record. That trend can’t continue, but I hope it keeps going as long as possible.

For some reason, I’ve had a massive increase in followers over the last two months as well. I have no idea why. Again, that can’t continue, but I’m not complaining.

Think of boosts as a bonus

I still think the best practice is to do your best work and write as much as possible. It kind of seems like boosts come in bursts. Also, the nominators start to run out of nominations at the end of the month, so you’re more likely to get boosted in the early days.

If your earnings are lagging this month, don’t be too concerned. The bread and butter of writing on Medium comes from the articles that make you $20-$30. If you do that every day, you’ll keep close to your targets. I believe that if you write consistently and build an audience, good things will happen.

As always, don’t hesitate to leave questions or comments.