I Have One Big, Giant, Problem With Medium’s “Boosted” Program
Everything works in theory. Until narcissistic people get involved.
Medium sure has gone through all kinds of payment formats since I started poking around back in 2020 or so.
In those days, you made money based on how many claps an article received…although not exactly. Every clap was valued differently based on how many other claps a reader handed out.
Claps were like exclamation points. Some people never used them, for others, it’s their preferred method of completing a sentence!!
Thankfully, Medium eventually leaned into determining money based on views and interactions. A payment method the platform more or less still uses, although there have been all kinds of tweaks.
Not long ago, publications played a major role in distribution, and then the powers that be would select top-performing articles from these publications and plastered them on the one and only landing page.
Having your article appear on the landing page assured you of financial success. In those days, if you slapped a somewhat provocative title onto an article that steeply divided readers and provoked them into comment wars, you could make yourself a mint.
