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?

Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

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.