Medium’s Unsustainable Compensation Model

A very short rant

Erik Blair
Sep 10, 2023
Photo by Emil Kalibradov on Unsplash

I have always liked Medium and the ease of writing articles and publishing them on Medium. And, at least in the beginning, I didn’t mind the low compensation.

Here are three of my best performing articles, the number of readers, and the month and year they were published.

Sept 2021 — 2.7K readers; lifetime earnings: $232.00

June 2022 — 2.7K readers; lifetime earnings: $130.00

March 2023 — 3.4K readers; lifetime earnings: $3.82

Do you notice a trend or pattern emerging? I definitely do.

For those who don’t see it, note the decimal point position.

Yes, I am aware that Medium has a bunch of cool ways of describing how they determine earnings, but the proof is in the three examples above. See for yourself.

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