Member-only story
Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?
The New Medium Tip Drill
I had to laugh at one of today’s morning emails. Medium is testing a new tipping widget. Ya know — so we can all make more money. Ask your readers to throw you a dime in their prime. You get the idea.
Here’s the problem: A great percentage of Medium’s paying members are the wannabe writers who flood the site with their own work. Thus, Medium is telling the same people who barely make coffee money, to take those few cents and fork them over to other people in the same boat. Effectively, it will simply recirculate the pennies we make here. It’s a zero-sum game unless non-paying members ante up (good luck with that) — or the occasional non-writing member actually contributes. Allow me to give you a little insight therein.
We’ve all been enlisted into the subscription model. Entice an outside reader to pay for Medium and we get almost half of the money that person pays for membership. Ya know — the old referred member deal. But if only Medium members read your stories, that’s a complete waste of time. They’re already members. You can’t make any money that way. Thus, I don't add the sales pitch to any of my stories unless I see a significant number of outside reads. If that happens, I add the come on.
Owing to Medium’s domain authority (and maybe my keywords), I will occasionally…
