Your Medium Stories About Medium Will Soon Stop Earning
No more meta
You may have heard the news already, but if you haven’t, Medium is about to ban all meta content about Medium and the partner program from earning money from the partner program.
This is not surprising.
If anything, I’m kind of wondering why it took them this long. But it does make me think about my own journey here. I never came to Medium with the intention of writing about Medium itself.
That just kind of… happened.
And yes, I see the irony here. This is a meta post about Medium. Some of my most popular and highest-earning stories are Medium-related. Yet, I am fine with this change, because this stuff is getting old quickly.
I had a good run writing about Medium issues, tips, and tricks for a while, but that sort of dried up when Medium introduced the boost. For me at least. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop the influx of (bad) stories about Medium.
And here’s where it gets really interesting — and where Medium should be paying attention.
The platform doesn’t just need to ban stories about Medium itself. That’s just treating a symptom, not the disease.
What they really need to tackle is the whole ecosystem of meta content that’s taken over, the past years.
I’m talking about all those “How to Make $10,000 Writing on XYZ” stories, the endless “5 Secret Tips to Gaming the Algorithm” posts, the “How Much You Can Make from [Insert Platform Here]” articles, and basically anything that’s more about making money from writing than the actual writing itself.
This kind of content has created a weird ecosystem where writers are just talking to other writers about writing and making money from writing, instead of … well, simply writing for actual readers.
Not all of this is bad.
It’s easy to spot the difference between great tips and tricks and just basic fluff that any AI could make up. There’s good meta content and bad meta content. But it’s hard for an algorithm to spot this difference, I guess.
The platform has become flooded with the bad kind, though, pushing out genuine, thoughtful content about real-world topics that could actually benefit readers… and writers.
So while I understand Medium’s move to ban paywalled stories about Medium itself, I think they’re missing the bigger picture.
They need to look at the entire ecosystem of meta content that’s developed here.
I guess we’ll see how this all plays out. The first step, so to speak. It’s not a bad one, in my eyes. And I, for one, don’t mind writing meta content for free if I want to share some honest tips or ideas or issues I come across. I do that on other platforms as well. Pay or not.
What do you think?
everything ends up getting monetised and then they turn down the monetisation which hurts people writing really good stuff that isn't just a sales pitch.
Is it so bad with medium?