100 Or Bust?

Why The New Medium Partner Program Requirement Is Not Unreasonable

It's been six months since Medium announced the changes to their Partner Program, which allows writers to get paid for their content. 

It's been almost two months since the deadline of December 31st, 2021, and yet there are still people complaining about the new requirements being 'too strict' or 'un-necessary' or 'unfair'. Allow me to explain why that's wrong.

First, some background…

On August 11th, 2021, Medium announced that in order to continue participating in the Medium Partner Program, which allows writers to earn money for their stories, they would need a minimum of 100 followers by the end of the year, and publish at least 1 story every six months.

Now, unless you've actually managed to make yourself popular in a niche, or wrote professionally, most people had a relatively small following, and this caused a lot of those casual writers to panic. 

Articles sprung up all over the place, promising a guaranteed way to get 100 followers in a week, or boasting about how they already had the magic number. (Most of those articles were so much hot air from people who already had a large following on some other platform)

I signed up to Medium in March of 2015, though I didn't start writing until May of 2018, around the same time that I gained my 10th follower. Apparently, my comments on other people's stories were worth reading, and worth following in case I ever got off my backside long enough to research and write a proper article. Yes, it surprised me, too…

I started writing more seriously in July of 2021, when the Medium Writers Contest was announced, and my sole entry had far more of an impact than I was expecting.

It wasn't until August, when Medium made that fateful announcement, that I started actively chasing followers. Undoubtedly, the process took longer than I would have liked, and it took nearly the full four months to get from 14 followers to over 100, but I managed it.

Between "Follow for Follow" exchanges, an outpouring of content, more online interaction than I usually do in a month, and some last-ditch begging on my Author Facebook Page that is normally reserved for upcoming book releases, I made it.

I breathed a massive sigh of relief on December 12th (and then went straight back into panic mode when I stopped obsessing over my follower count and realised how much Christmas Shopping I had left to do…)

To those who are still struggling, or thought they could be an exception to the rules…

I empathize, I truly do.

It sucks, it's scary, and way more effort than output for people who just want to write about random things that interest them. It's a lot of effort to get followers on a largely English-speaking platform if English is not your first language. It's disappointing that you'll no longer be able to earn money here.

But Medium is still a business, and they're justified in cutting down on people who load up a single story with SEO clickbait keywords, then sit back and wait for the money to roll in. If they're going to pay out actual money, then they want to be paying people who consistently generate creative content, and whose content will actually be read, even if only by a few people out of their 100+ followers.

I don't read every story from every person I follow, and I'm under no illusion that my followers read every one of my stories, either. They'll read the ones that relate to their interests, and scroll past the ones that don't appeal to them, just like I do. But, my stats page assures me that within 24 hours of publishing, at least two people read each article, at least one highlights something, and that count goes up once I share it around on social media, especially if I give in and write about a hot topic.

Everyone turned to online additional sources of income when the COVID-19 Pandemic went global in 2020, and while OnlyFans was the big hit, a lot of people turned to blogging or online amateur journalism.

Where Medium was once the go-to outside of writing for an online newspaper, it now has to compete with a boatload of other platforms, certainly not limited to Vocal, Reedsy, WritersCafe, Reddit, and a boatload of others that I don't particularly want to list at five minutes to midnight.

Gaining 100 followers might not be easy, but it is achievable, even for someone working three jobs for whom writing is the least of the side-gigs (ie. me). Anyone who didn't take advantage of those four months, followed by a fifth month's leeway for some who nearly had the numbers… by now has no-one to blame but themselves.

Even if you only joined recently, you can still write while you build up your following; you just need that following before you can start to earn money.

You knew the terms and conditions when you signed up, and Medium gave ample warning before they changed those conditions.

Stop whining, and start promoting yourself. The Partner Program will be there when you do.

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