Yes, this change will affect earnings on older stories, too. Any earnings from external member activity from Oct 1 onwards will be calculated under the new partner program rules.

Q: Why did you make this change?

The Medium Partner Program currently rewards writers for member activity on-platform, with the aim of incentivizing you to write those stories. That’s aligned with our goals and growth as a platform.

But there was a big part missing from our Partner Program: What about bringing new members to Medium? We know many of you do that through SEO, sharing stories, and more. We want to reward that behavior, too. This initial, small change is our first step at shifting the Partner Program to incentivize and reward the kind of writing that makes Medium attract new members as well as keep existing members happy with the writing on Medium.

TL;DR: We made this change to reward writers for bringing members to Medium through external channels, starting by shifting a small portion of payouts towards stories that generate this external traffic.

Q: What’s next?

We’ll review how this shift changed writer and reader behavior, and use that information to make the next change to the Partner Program. Ultimately, we’re optimizing the Partner Program to grow Medium, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how we can make it a better fit for more writers.

Keep your eyes on your email and this blog for the next announcement, coming soon!

Other Product Updates

We’ve made two recent changes to Medium behind the scenes.

First, we have sunsetted the /subscribe page. We want to make it as simple and easy as possible for writers to build a following on Medium. Previously, you could point readers to a specific subscribe page by adding /subscribe to the end of your profile URL, for example, Medium.com/@zulie_at_medium/subscribe. You could also choose to promote that link on your profile page in the settings.

We recently sunsetted that option to simplify the reading experience for readers, and the publishing settings page for writers. We also found that writers are getting far more subscribers from our recent tweak to the follow button, while the /subscribe page was ineffective for the vast majority of writers.

If you have that link on any of your stories, it will now redirect to your profile page.

Second, we are experimenting with different daily publishing limits, and how many stories a writer can publish or schedule in 24 hours. We are doing this to prevent bad actors from gaming the system by publishing an unrealistic number of low-quality stories per day.

We know many of you have asked for this as readers and editors, so we hope this is a welcome improvement to Medium for you. If this disrupts your daily publishing strategy, we apologize, and ask for your patience while we experiment with these limits to address the abuse of the platform.

How-to resources

Every month, we release new how-to resources to help you understand how to tell your story and reach your readers on Medium. Here’s the latest rundown.

Your invite to our Medium 101 webinar

If you’re a beginner on Medium, wondering:

• How to write a story
• What publications are and how they work
• How to use the paywall
• What your formatting options are

Please join us for our Medium 101 webinar. We cover all that and more. We also include a live Q&A portion for any questions you may have that aren’t covered in the webinar.