Partner Program

Medium’s New Incentive for Editors May Backfire

Because humans tend to fumble conflict of interest

Photo by luthfi alfarizi on Unsplash

Imagine you are one of several editors in a successful publication on Medium. You’ve been editing for a few months or a few years. For free, all this time.

Perhaps you are a conscientious editor who tries to polish every story to make it shine. Depending on the quality of the writing and the size of the writer’s ego, it takes you anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour to edit one submission. Or maybe you are an editor who has a feather-light touch towards editing. It takes you just a few minutes to scroll through the story and make sure the writer has checked all the boxes in the submission guidelines.

By now, you’d have received a gratifying email from Medium informing that you — the editor — will soon be rewarded for your editorial work. If your publication has been selected for the Editor Partner Program, you can expect to receive 25% of what a writer earns for a story that you edited.

This next bit is important: This doesn’t reduce the writer’s earnings in any way; the extra 25% payment comes out of Medium’s coffers.

Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it? Not in my book.

So how is this a losing proposition?

1. The lottery-like nature of viral stories can cause jealousy

Your Medium writer gets lucky, and that story you edited goes absurdly viral. A modest windfall for you, congratulations! All for doing what you’ve always been doing.

The problem is every other editor in your publication can see how well that story is performing. If only they had picked that story to edit…

2. Self-interested behaviours abound

Those other editors might turn to something more predictable — regular contributors whose stories tend to receive high readership and high engagement. Yes, those stories would give editors nice payouts.

If I had understood game theory correctly from watching A Beautiful Mind 25 years ago, every editor now has the same idea and is gunning for the same handful of high-performing regular contributors. Unless there are fixed rules on how submissions are assigned to editors, the fastest finger wins and the owner of that finger earns that sweet 25%.

The publication owner also knows that their fellow editors know about this new prized category of submissions, and vice versa. This means there’s now more power in publication owners’ hands, which translates to bigger headaches. Or unfairness, perceived or actual. Much depends on the publication owner’s motivations for running a Medium publication.

By the way, there’s an unexpected perk for those high-performing contributors. Their submissions will now be published swiftly. Just imagine how delightful this is for AI-writers who managed to slip past human detectors for AI writing and have built up a sizeable following on Medium.

3. High-performing writers now have more leverage

High-performing writers are also in on the game theory thing. If their stories consistently do well, and they are such good writers that their stories need minimal editing, they might think “Hey, maybe I should find some way to leverage my star power”.

Off the top of my head, I can imagine someone asking for 10% of that 25% if they consistently publish with a specific publication. Or a non-monetary perk such as the Featured story of the week. When a payout is sizeable enough, greed and entitlement will find a way to claw at it. Sorry, fellow humans.

4. Writers don’t receive proper editorial support

With editorial efforts tied to monetary compensation, the editor is now incentivised to maximise their returns on their editing work. Money-minded editors naturally wouldn’t want to spend too much time editing stories by writers with a small reach. Or stories that don’t stand out.

What’s the point of putting in a lot of effort and time to edit a story that will make mere pennies? Previously, publication editors didn’t have to contend with this question, but the game has changed.

5. New writers are the biggest losers here

With this new incentive in place, Medium confirmed in a blog post that the long-comatose Boost Nomination program is now dead.

Boosts had worked in increasing the visibility of new and fantastic writers. I know because I edited for Pragmatic Wisdom almost daily for four months in 2024 before stepping down to start cancer treatment.

With the removal of Boost nominations, and editors being incentivised to edit stories of writers who already have high readership and engagement, the odds of finding writing success on Medium are more heavily stacked against a new writer than ever.

Who are the winners then, when this new incentive kicks in?

Primarily, the owner-editor of a successful publication who edits all the submissions themself. Congratulations, your past dedication and perseverance have paid off, and I’m truly happy for you.

Other winners include:

• AI writers who have been successful in (a) passing off their AI-written stories as human writing and (b) building up readership and engagement for their AI-written stories. They will see their stories published much quicker although that speed still pales in comparison to how quickly they can prompt AI to write 20 stories.
• Editors who edit those human-passing but AI-written stories because they don’t have to spend much time editing them.
• Editors who aren’t serious about editing. They could cast their net wide and “edit” as many submissions as they can, in hopes of some of them going viral.

Discord amongst fellow editors within the same publication. Editors trying to game the system. Favouring already-successful writers. Prejudicing new writers. Is this what Medium intended? I would love to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

I felt so dismayed after reading the email from Medium that I wanted to downgrade my membership status from “Friend” to “Member”. I’m not paying three times the regular membership fees to fund this new direction that Medium is taking.

But when I reached the “Manage membership” page, I was reminded that my current “Friend” status allows me to share member-only stories with anyone. It’s a perk I use from time to time to share thoughtful and inspiring stories from my favourite writers Jes Kerzen, DL Nemeril, and Grace Delphia.

Fine, I’ll keep my “Friend” status for now. Medium, you got this one right.

Thank you for reading, and may you always meet an encouraging and conscientious editor when you submit your story to a Medium publication.

(Shout-out to my former fellow editors James Bellerjeau, JD, MBA and Maryan Pelland, Woman with a Pen for showing me the ins and outs of good editing during my stint at Pragmatic Wisdom. For the avoidance of doubt, you both are encouraging and conscientious editors — I witnessed it up close.)