Why I gave Up on Getting Paid by Medium.com
I love to write. It helps me to organize my thoughts and form opinions. Writing things out is a great tool for getting clarity.
So about 168 articles ago I decided to write for medium.com. It made sense. I would produce great content and hopefully, get paid.
Almost from the very beginning, I smelled the rat.
I would write an article and publish it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and lately Bizfluence. Some of these articles got several hundred views.
Then at the end of the month, I could not even break the 20 cents level. I reached out to medium.com and they told me simply that I did not have that level of readership. BUT my information from these other channels said otherwise.
I pushed back a couple of times and then decided to focus on the content.
After writing the article I often took the paid link and send it out to my connections and main feeds of the networks. I thought that was the proper thing to do.
BUT lately, I have decided to instead start sharing the friend link. The read the article free link.
I no longer care if medium.com pays me anything.
Their model is broken and I am not going to spend any energy to help them fix it. I will still write my content and post it daily.
Why am I telling you this?
I have concluded that medium.com does not deserve my energy and I can care less about their 20 cents. By controlling what I can control, the content, I am hoping that people enjoy and learn from it. The idea of being able to turn this love for writing into a full-time career is just not going to happen with medium.com.
The world gets its information from many sources. I thought that having a paid site benefited both medium and writers. I now see it as only beneficial to medium. By bringing people to them, they have benefited BUT not shared that benefit with me.
It is what it is…
There will be other places that will see the benefit of providing a way for writers to get paid. I still think that people want new ideas and for someone to add pieces to existing ideas. Someone to help connect the dots.
If you know of another platform that rewards its writers, let me know.
My four cents…
