Medium
Sharing Free Reading Links Is The Sure Way To Start A Death Spiral On Medium.
Who will want to pay when you keep giving it away for free?
Are you training your non-Medium readers to expect your stories to be free?
It’s creating expectations everything will be free which leads your readers on external sites to resist signing up to get behind the Medium paywall.
Readers get used to reading for free. So, they balk at having to pay to sign up to read more. You need to educate them with more than a link at the end of a story. Explain the benefits of a paid membership.
Are your views/read ratios dismal and even falling, which affects your remuneration from Medium?
- Constantly sharing free links to increase your readership from external sources screws up your view/read ratios and lowers your earning rate from MPP.
- Even sharing a link that triggers a view but not an immediate read affects your MPP payment. 30 seconds might count as a “read” but it’s a tiny part of how Medium calculates the value of the overall interaction.
Buster Benson spoke of this when he clearly spelled out that coming back to a post at which you have taken a sneak peak, but didn’t have time to read and finish a valid interaction, means your second visit doesn’t add to the original “read” time.
- Another important criterion is whether you are actively engaging with a range of writers on Medium, by leaving comments on posts. Because they used to get counted! If you write an excellent comment on another writer’s story, I encourage you to tick the box and have it added to your own profile page as a story. They are searchable! It will add to your credibility as a Medium member.
January 2024 was the first time I cracked the $US 100 club, but even then my V/R ratio was 50.76% and it has been consistently around the 50% mark since September 2023 when Medium froze earnings while they tried to deal with various earning scams.
- My V/R ratio in May 2023 was 65.84% which included my comments as interactions on other writer’s stories.
Sharing stories with free links in online groups for Medium members is counter-intuitive.
I see members sharing stories including FREE LINKS via their posts in Facebook and LinkedIn groups where every person in the group is a member of Medium.
Those members of the group can open the story with their membership. You don’t want them using your FREE reading link. You are paying for that.
It simply registers as a VIEW/READ from an external source.
What you do want is a paying Medium Member to open your story on the platform.
What you do want is a paying Medium member opening and reading your Paywall story, because Medium will recognise them as a Member and pay you accordingly. Medium has a virtual shadow browser that recognises them as a paying member, once they continue after leaving Facebook to read your story.
Free readers have no incentive at all to leave a comment, so you have no way of knowing how well your story has been received.
Yes, they may be Medium members, coming from an external source. But if they read for free, why would they bother to comment on your story?
We are currently plagued with “readers” who spare us 30 seconds, give a few claps and highlight a sentence or two. But they do not leave meaningful comments. Even worse, you do not know if they are stealing your content!
When they come to read from an external source, attracted by your Free Story link, why are they are not induced to sign up and pay for that level of interaction?
- Does your writing suck?
- Do you not tell a compelling story?
- Is the topic of no genuine interest to them?
Unless you stop putting Free Story links in every post, you will never build a worthwhile audience on Medium. Your strategy may be to use Free Stories on Medium to redirect readers elsewhere — but it needs to be a planned method of getting a long-term audience.
Medium writers in Facebook groups are either just plain selfish or obtuse when it comes to FOM.
Right from the beginning in the Facebook sharing groups and on LinkedIn, I noticed there was a complete disconnect from the ethos of FOM link sharing.
When a Friend of Medium shares a link from another writer, why do people not acknowledge the original writer, instead of saying “fully engaged etc” and then dropping their own link?
Because as the sharer, I have no vested interest in your response.
If you are genuinely “fully engaged “, did you not notice that the WRITER of the story you are clapping and highlighting and leaving comments for them to read is NOT the person to whose post you are responding?
In the beginning, I spent a lot of time sharing FOM links of stories I liked for writers I respected. In the end, I stopped doing it — because I was spending my own subscription money and those commenting were oblivious to the truth of the writer. I now prefer to spend my subscription money on rewarding the writers I appreciate. Whether they are a FOM or not.
The Friend of Medium strategy by Medium appears to have been a failure across the board. Sharing those FOM links does not appear to be leading to an increase in readership and followers, except where small groups have blatantly abused it by creating ‘forced growth’ and now we are enduring this current purge on Medium.
Only links shared by Friends of Medium compensate the writer (not regular-tier friend links).
“Friends of Medium will be able to create and share Friend Links for any paywalled story. When non-members follow these links and bypass the paywall, their read time is factored into the writer’s earnings. This means you can drive more earnings and reach for writers you love by sharing Friend Links to their stories”
As with other reads, there is a cap on how much your membership can pay out. So if a Friend-tier link to your article is shared and goes viral and you get 10,000 views — those will all break down into fractions of your membership. A membership that caps out under $15 (but less than that, because Medium takes a piece to keep the servers running and to pay Breana). via Robin Wilding 💎
There’s much more and admittedly written by Robin when the FOM was first launched. Even then, the rise of the forced growth strategy groups we have seen which led to the recent purges was forecast.
This is how Tony Stubblebine responded to a question about “falling repayments” in a Facebook group — on September 29, 2023.
- In a nutshell, the more people who interact with your story in an “inauthentic manner” the less that interaction is deemed to be worth.
I have a couple of other things I want to share, but I will save them for another day. I have been looking at my SEO in my posts and learning a bit more about how to improve it. Not that I am an SEO expert by any means, but even I can see room for improvement.
I hope this story is helpful for those who are new to Medium and who want to build a good following of interactive readers.
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