Medium to Writers: Please Clap
Credit to Author: Louise Matsakis| Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 18:44:05 +0000
Publishing platform Medium announced Tuesday that it will allow a “small group of writers and publications” to join its Partner Program. Writers participating in it will now get paid based on “engagement.” The primary signal of that engagement is how many “claps” (Medium’s version of a like) a post receives.
In other words, the more claps your article gets, the more money you make.
Earlier this year, Medium laid off a third of its staff, and promised to work on finding a more sustainable business model. It soon launched a paid subscription service, which allows customers to access exclusive articles for $5 a month. Previously, Medium divided an individual subscription fee among all the articles a person read that month. Now, articles with more claps will be given a larger share of the pie. Medium didn’t reveal how much a single clap would factor in.
The problem is that unlike a “like” on Facebook or Twitter, you can “clap” at a Medium post as many times as you want, and people are already starting to abuse the system. Journalist Karen K. Ho, for example, posted a Medium article that only said “Am I doing this correctly?” and has already received over 2,000 claps.
In a genius move, Tess Rinearson, who describes herself as a former Medium employee on Twitter, showed how a banana could be used to continuously clap at an article by balancing it on top of a phone.
“There is a lot we need to figure out to make this work right,” several members of Medium’s product team wrote in the blog post announcing the new revenue model. It looks like it!
We’ve reached out to Medium for comment and will update this post if we hear back.