How My Small Start on Medium Turned into a Large Success…
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Writing, Success, Entrepreneurship, Medium, Writing Tips

Photo by Kalea Jerielle on Unsplash

How My Small Start on Medium Turned into a Large Success…

And got turned back into a very small start again.

Three years ago this coming March, I started writing for Medium.

I wrote my butt off. I’m a prize-winning author and journalist. I learned the system, figured shit out, and produced.

AND I worked diligently to tag, include, highlight, engage fellow Medium writers. I was a HUGE fan of the platform. Threw my heart and soul into it. Got published in the bigger pubs, curated often (remember that? hahahahaha) and expanded my reach.

By January of this year I was up to 82, 971 views per month. Earning $2595.27 for that month. And growing.

Not too shabby.

I continued to produce my ass off, thinking, foolishly, that…

a) this would continue and even more stupidly,

b) I could count on this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Well SILLY ME.

I am up to — on my profile at least — 7.4K followers.

Except that with all the meddling and fiddling that Medium did this year, two things happened:

a) they disappeared nearly all my followers, but didn’t bother to inform me or anyone else who had the same thing happen as to why, no matter how many times you and I write and ask- with perfectly good justification- WTF?

b) I am now getting these happy dappy emails informing me that I am UP to 7435 followers. What happened to the other 95%? And yes, this is system wide. Ask around. I did. I am not alone.

Do I need to tell you what happened to my earnings? Please.

And this during a year where all my other work died, as I am a travel blogger, and so did my classroom training. Zero income from that, therefore Medium was far more important. Again, I am hardly alone.

But wait, there’s more. This is the VERY BEST PART.

Several times this year my earnings plummeted. I worked my ass off to bring them back up. By August I was back up to 48k views. And I earned $1647.95.

Christ that was a long slog back up the mountain. But WAIT!

Apparently Medium cannot bear to allow their hardest working writers to earn real money. Because all of a sudden, over the course of just a few weeks, my earnings plummeted again and so did my views.

Nothing I did differently. Other than keep right on writing. Oh. I did send a few rather curtly worded emails to Arthur, one of Your Friends at Medium, who doesn’t respond any more.

Nobody does if you ask the hard questions.

My readers (those who are determined enough to track me down again, which is no longer very easy, based on what they tell me) complain:

Your stuff doesn’t show up any more The follow button refuses to work And by the way, apparently mine doesn’t either because the folks I follow and like best, hell, what happened? Did they head off to Disney World and get lost in the Haunted House? Because even if I tag them, I don’t hear from them. And finally, they are sick and tired of the mediocrity of the writing, the insulting quality of the material that is being pushed at them that they didn’t sign up for. Hey, I didn’t say it, they did. And, here’s a surprise: THEY ARE LEAVING MEDIUM.

Here’s one comment:

I’m leaving Medium, enjoyed your writing, thank you. I might check back in six months and see if the site has improved. Right now it’s just a crowded field of mediocrity and too hard to find you and a few other good writers I wanted to read. You are special but right now Medium isn’t.

Have I communicated all this to Your Friends at Medium (YFM)? Of course I did. I sent articles and comments and other people’s stuff all pointing to the same thing. All. Year. Long.

Crickets.

Look. I’m military. When the whole unit is doing well, we all do well. But what do I know? I’m just a Fortune 100 consultant not working full time in the big leagues any more. By choice. Because I thought I could make this work (yes, of course I am working on an email list.) And, I switched careers years ago.

To one one of the things I do really well: write. Prolifically.

So. All you happy-dappy enthusiasts and newbies who tell us how to write for Medium (and I am addressing YOU, who had a grammatical typo in your title, and whose writing was so execrable I was in tears by the third paragraph, but your story got promoted) I would offer that you might want to practice a little caveat emptor.

For those thousands of readers who joined at least in part to read my shit, Medium gets to keep their money.

How curious then, those same readers don’t seem to be able to read my stuff regularly, which they paid to read. Yah. Funny thing about that.

Hey. Just saying. Far be it for me to posit an obvious question.

So there you have it. I am back in the minor leagues, forced to play small again, after working my aging ass off to develop a following, only to have it gutted by the gods that be at Medium, Multiple times. Our Friends at Medium, as it were.

And folks wonder why so many of us are so actively seeking out other options. I am tired to death of this kind of ripoff of talent for profit.

A great writer, Dr. S, whose work occasionally shows up here and whom I am proud to call my pen pal, said this when I told him what happened with Medium this year, a year when all of us so desperately needed the funds that we had the right to be paid:

I’m stunned that you were making that much from Medium. And less stunned that they found a way to screw the writers.

Yep. Write in, they will tell you OH it’s a bug.

Yes, folks. And I’m a dung beetle.

While it is obvious that I am on occasion full of shit, in this case I am exhausted trying to push my shit uphill in a Sysyphean attempt to actually earn real money on this platform.

I genuinely care about my readers, and I genuinely care(d) about the success of this platform. Until, well, until this year.

Because what used to be that Shining City on a Hill, called Medium, has devolved into Mediocre, with thousands of folks writing articles about how to make thousands on Medium, while Medium apparently spends its days ignoring its writers’ questions and finding new ways to monetize us for the shareholders.

But hey. What do I know? I’m a dung beetle.