Arpad, a lot is going on with Medium as a platform. Both in the changing "look and feel" of the site and in it's economic model and orientation.
As usual, the people in charge are spinning the truth and being opaque about the things they don't want to discuss. Let's start with the platform itself.
THE PLATFORM:
The platform has significant processing delays and performance problems. It degraded significantly last year when they were grooming the platform for sale. It has improved under the new management team but they are trying to salvage a botched update project.
I did a few years of IT Project Management during the dot.com years. What you are feeling/seeing is a project fail.
They had a working platform a few years ago that was doing stats in real-time and things like "the entity bar". However, it felt dated and it was structured towards a "Writers Collective" economic model.
It was not attractive to investors and or buyers. How do you monetize that?
So, the wave of "upgrades", changes, and "new features" of the last year. If you have ever done a major software project you are already wincing. These kinds of projects are fraught with peril.
What we have been living through is that upgrade. From what I can see they botched it. It's probably over budget, over deadline, buggy, and slower than what they started with.
But, now it will read your stories out loud. So, they can pitch Medium as a sort of Audiobook or podcast site to investors.
Now that Ev is gone. The new guy is getting the project under control and trying to stabilize the platform. But yeah, the stats are extremely laggy and they update in weird patterns as batch updates are done at different times.
The platform itself is morphing into something they think is new, shiny, and hopefully attractive to investors. It would be nice if they were honest about that instead of bullshit stories about "improving everyone's experience".
WHAT MEDIUM IS:
It boils down to the question of what Medium wants to be.
Does it want to be a "writers collective" or a "writers marketplace"?
These are very different models with very different reward mechanisms for participants. I would say that Medium used to be a writer's collective and is moving in the direction of Substack towards becoming a writers marketplace.
In a marketplace model, Medium simply provides a platform for you to set up shop. If you have ever worked a flea market (I did for years helping my mother) you know how it works.
They make their money by renting you the space and providing a crowd. The rest is up to you.
In this case you get 50% and they get 50%. Which BTW is about the cut brothels in Nevada take (the things you can learn on television these days). That's actually a fairly generous split.
If you are a big name writer that people sign up to follow. You can really make bank.
If you have followers who are that into you, start telling them to send you money so you can write for them. It's a great model for you.
I got 4 subscribers one month and was amazed at the bump in earnings from just those 4 people. Of course they cancelled after 2 months and I'm back to zero but it was illuminating.
In the "New Medium" the road to big earnings is lots of subscribers, not followers.
This has consequences for everyone else.
What this does, is suck money out of the overall pool for the "writer's collective" portion of Medium.
Here's an example.
Suppose I suddenly got crazy successful and 10,000 people signed up for Medium mostly just to read my work (fantasy of course, I am not a popular guy).
Under the old "writers collective" model all of the "dues" went into the common pot.
Medium takes its cut for running the platform and all the "qualifying writers" get paid based on the views/reads mechanism. The more readers you had, the more you got paid.
The bigger the common pot. The bigger the payouts can be.
In the market model. I get to keep half of those readers "dues" for myself.
That's 25K a month for me! But that money comes "off the top" and doesn't do anything for the rest of the writers in the collective.
Medium then gets their cut, and what's leftover is what gets put in the collective pot. Obviously it's going to be a smaller amount.
That's why everyone who doesn't hustle subscribers are watching their earnings crashing.
The writers with subscription fan bases are basically pulling money out of the system.
You can think about this in a number of ways. I am still not sure how I think/feel about it. It's not the Medium I was enchanted by a few years ago.
But that's what's happening.
Again, it would be nice if they explained this to us like adults. Instead of treating us like mushrooms by keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit.
Anyway, those are my thoughts based on what I can see.
