Are Medium Publications Leaving?

Image created by author.

P.S. I Love You is shutting down. And Medium has been moving towards reader-writer relationships instead of reader-publication. Plus, Medium’s editorial publications have been defunded.

With that final goodbye, we can see the future of Medium is changing forever.

This article will get into three sections.

1. We’re gonna talk about what’s happening. What are the changes? Which publications are shutting down?

2. We’re gonna talk about why. Why did Medium pull the plug? This is gonna have some history.

3. And finally, we’re gonna discuss what this means for you. It’s got real implications.

If you prefer watching, you can see my video here:

What’s happening to Medium publications?

Quick history: Medium has had publications since it’s been around. Medium publications are collections of stories run by regular people about one theme. For example, P.S. I Love You is about relationships. It was run by Dan Moore and Kay Bolden, two fantastic editors, not affiliated with Medium.

On Medium, whenever you published a story, it would go to your profile and optionally to a publication of your choice. People who followed the publication - even if they didn’t follow you! - would see the story.

They have always been a way to get more viewers. On Medium, distribution shows your stories to readers they think will be interested. Publications were a great way o give your story a head start. If you wrote about relationships, you published in PSILY because you knew it would find dedicated, interested readers. All of my top stories have been published in publications.

Recently, Medium sneakily partnered with them. We don’t know the details, but we know a handful of publications - P.S. I Love you and the Ascent among them - were given a monthly income based on how many views they pulled in.

Even more recently, Medium dissolved this partnership. They will no longer be paying money to PSILY or The Ascent, and probably have dropped most if not all of the other “partner” pubs. This comes on the heels of Medium buying out the staff of all their editorial publications like OneZero and Debugger, which were run by professional editors and Medium employees. I can happily reveal that I no longer earn a flat fee publishing with those publications like I used to.

Onto part 2.

Why did Medium pull the plug on publications?

Let’s quickly differentiate here: Medium did not pull the plug on publications. It merely stopped funding them. Publications like Darby Day’s Creatures’ will continue running as is. I think this is an important point - we’ll come back to that.

But why did Medium pull the plug on funding them?

Let’s dive into the head of Medium. We know:

1. They want to become a more “Relational Medium”

2. They want to convert readers to paid subscribers

3. They have a better and more holistic view of the content that is doing that.

So we can assume that paying publications for views, either their own or their partner pubs, was not ultimately converting readers to monthly subscribers. What is? Well, they clearly think that what’s driving that is the relationship between writers and readers. NOT publications and readers.

Medium did this because those investments did not pay off. Plain and simple.

I want to reiterate again: they did not cancel PSILY, they did not kick PSILY out. They removed funding for PSILY and PSILY decided to leave due to that. Most publications on Medium do NOT earn a stipend. The Ascent, faced with a similar injunction, chose to stay and see how things pan out.

Now let’s get into the most interesting part: what this means for you.

What does this mean for you?

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: I saw this coming. I was pretty sure Medium was going to stop prioritizing publications and curation with their switch to relational Medium. It’s been 8 months since they announced it.

So I trialed self-publishing stories. If Medium’s algorithm was going to start deprioritizing publications, I wanted to know about it.

And you know what I found? That my stories in publications performed better. Considerably better. I retroactively added all my self-pubbed stories to my own publication, Zulie Writes to try to rescue them, but it was too late.

This confirms what we should have already known: the algorithm, however it may be, can’t compete with having a native audience for your stories. Especially for beginners on Medium, publications are and STILL are key for growth, finding your audience, playing around with your niche, exploring your voice.

I believe:

• Publications will still exist, just not Medium-sponsored ones

• Medium will spend more time, money, and other resources on individual writers

• Publications will still give writers a leg up on views

If you were a regular contributor for P.S. I Love You, I’d recommend you look for an alternative like Hello, Love, where you know the audience will be the same. I’d also recommend that you, like me, experiment with occasionally self-publishing the odd story. Keep an eye on the trending posts on Medium and on the tags pages, and see if self-published stories begin to outperform those within publications. Keep growing and publishing in your own publication, if you have one.

Otherwise? Carry on.