No more pay to write about Medium on Medium
Medium writers who haven’t opened your mail, be advised, there’s yet another change on the platform that could potentially affect your income.
For those of you who write about Medium on Medium, the days of getting paid for it are coming to an end. At least if the powers-that-be have their way.
In its February newsletter, Medium explained it’s trying to keep those “meta stories” out of readers’ feeds except in cases when readers asked to follow them.
What are meta stories, you may ask. “Posts about the Medium Partner Program, making money on Medium, or Boost…”
“We often hear from our members that these kinds of stories aren’t the ones they want to read, much less pay for,” the message stated.
That’s an interesting assessment given that pieces about Medium often performed very well and had high levels of engagement.
“You’re free to write meta stories, we just don’t want Partner Program funds going to them…” the message continued.
And to keep that from happening, this month, March 2025, Medium is supposed to start contacting writers who put “meta stories” behind the paywall, and then begin removing them.
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That’s right–being free to write about Medium on Medium will literally mean writing for free, if the platform has its way. Medium doesn’t want those type of stories behind the paywall.
Like other platforms, Medium is on board with the trend of continually switching things up to throw writers’ earnings off course. Of course, that’s never the stated reason. The changes are always done under the guise of improving the experience for somebody, somewhere.
Not long before this announcement, Medium announced editors at publications were getting the ability to feature stories. Then, “our system will recommend these stories more highly,” wrote Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine.
This change was allegedly a way of achieving the mission of “building a humans-first platform.”
“Featured Stories are another way that the Medium feed is curated by real humans with subject-matter expertise, not just algorithms,” wrote Stubblebine.
And I suppose that’s great news for those writers who want to try to put in more sweat and effort trying to claw their way to favor writing for publications. But not so much for the writers who have built an audience doing their own thing.
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