Member-only story
Medium’s Compensation Black Hole
Is it fair that authors don’t know how they’re being paid?
I enjoy writing for Medium. This platform has allowed me to reach thousands of readers who otherwise would never have heard my name. I like getting paid, too, although I only make enough each month for a tank of gas, if that. Indeed, only about eight percent of us hit the $100/month mark.
That’s fine. It’s better than nothing. We at least have opportunities to grow our audiences and thus our paychecks. Only thing is, we don’t know how our paychecks are calculated, and that’s a problem.
Oh, we know the broad outlines. Medium collects everyone’s membership fees, then splits some fraction of that pool among authors based on engagement. I say some fraction because presumably a portion of fees is applied to operating expenses and profits. But we don’t entirely know what “engagement” means.
There are four components to engagement — page views, reads, fans (claps), and responses — but that’s where our understanding of Medium earnings ends. If you try to compare reported stats to earnings, you’ll find it impossible to map the former onto the latter. Stats emails arrive weekly and payment emails monthly, but they don’t cover the same time periods. In February, I received stats emails for these periods:
