Hello writers,
Today’s (long and resource-filled!) newsletter gives you:
· Product updates
∘ Insights into presentations
∘ The first small shift in how we calculate earnings in the Medium Partner Program
∘ Other Product Updates
· How-to resources
∘ Your invite to our Medium 101 webinar
∘ Ask Medium: How to add a voiceover to your stories on Medium
∘ How to create a table of contents on Medium
∘ How to share your Medium story beyond Medium
∘ How to understand your stats and use them to reach your readers more effectively
· Publication corner
∘ Five reasons to start a publication, as provided by editors
· Events roundup
∘ A recap of Medium Day 2025
∘ Writing Hour
Let’s dive in.
Product updates
It’s been a busy month for us! Here’s what you may have missed.
Insights into presentations
Presentations are a new stat to help you understand how readers find your story on Medium. Here’s the blog post detailing the change: Which stories reach and grow your audience? Your new stats pages tell you.
The first small shift in how we calculate earnings in the Medium Partner Program
This is actually two announcements. First: As of this month, Medium’s Partner Program will now reward external traffic. Here’s the blog post detailing the change.
What’s changed: When a paying Medium member comes to your story from outside Medium, such as through email, social media, or DMs, your paywalled story will earn slightly more than if that member had come across your story someplace else on Medium, like the home feed or app.
Second, this is the first of several small changes we plan on making to the Medium Partner Program. We want to make these changes transparently, so writers understand how we plan on rewarding you for sharing your stories and bringing in new members. Keep an eye on the Medium blog (and this newsletter) for monthly updates.
We know this change has already caused a lot of good questions to crop up, so we answered those here. You can also read them below.
Q: What is the change to the Medium Partner Program, exactly?
When a member reads your story through non-Medium channels, like through social media or search, you will earn 5% more from their activity (reads, replies, highlights, etc) than if they had come to your story through Medium, like the app, the daily or weekly digest emails, or on the web homepage.
You can read more about how we calculate earnings here.
Q: How are we rewarding external traffic?
“Reward” means specifically through earnings in the Medium Partner Program when a Medium member reader your story, and they come from outside Medium. With this most recent update, here’s no change to distribution based on activity from outside Medium.
Q: How does this affect non-member activity?
With this most recent update, non-member activity is unchanged. Non-member activity doesn’t earn any money.
Q: What happens if a reader comes through a friend link?
If a member reads your story through a friend link you shared outside Medium, you’ll get the small bonus to earnings. If it’s shared inside Medium, your earnings will not change. If a non-member reads your story through a friend link, your earnings are unchanged since we’re currently only taking into account member activity.
One important point of disambiguation: For a friend link that a Friend of Medium member shares of a story that is not their own, we consider non-member views the same as member views, so external traffic by non-members via a Friend of Medium link does get the 5% bonus.
Q: Will this change apply to older stories?
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.
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