I had been a regular contributor at Medium for a couple of years already. Slowly, I’ve been accumulating followers and had been earning a small sum of royalties consistently. In fact, through me, Medium had earned a paid subscriber!
All these came crashing down today. I received this email from Medium:
A few weeks ago, we sent you a notice that your account might be removed from our Partner Program, because it did not meet our eligibility requirement of having at least 100 followers. We’re sorry to inform you that your account still has not met this requirement, and as a result, it has been removed from our Partner Program.
In one swoop, my consistent monthly revenue will go down to ZERO.
There are many speculations on why Medium chose to do that. Some say they are doing that to fight spam. Others say it is for fighting low-quality content.
Whatever the reasons are, I am not happy about that. One of the reasons why Medium is such a great place to hang out is the awesome content that its writers contribute.
I am one of those writers.
But Medium chose to show me the middle finger. So, why should I work for free and continue to contribute to making it an awesome place? Of course not!
Sure, Medium has every right to do that. I too have every right to delete all my content on Medium and migrate to SubStack instead.
Goodbye Medium. I wouldn’t miss you.