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Medium Will Now Pay Writers Based On How Many 'Claps' They Get (theverge.com)
Medium is getting creative with how they're paying its writers. The San Francisco-based online publishing platform will determine how much an author is paid by how many claps a story receives. Claps are basically Medium's equivalent of a Like, and they recently replaced the "recommend" feature -- a little heart button at the end of each article. The Verge reports: The site wants people to send authors claps to show how much they enjoy reading each article. Now, those claps are actually going to mean something. Medium pays authors by dividing up every individual subscriber's fee between the different articles they've read that month. But rather than doing an even division between articles, Medium will weight payments toward whichever articles a subscriber gives the most claps to. It's not clear exactly how much each individual clap tips the scale, but you can be sure that writers will be asking readers to click that button. It's a pretty strange way to implement payments, since it relies on a really arbitrary metric that individual subscribers might use in really different and inconsistent ways. Time spent on page and whether someone shared an article probably would have been useful metrics by which to tell how much a reader enjoyed a piece, but maybe that makes too much sense for a startup in the middle of its second business model pivot. On the positive side, claps can help Medium surface content that people are enjoying and get it in front of more readers.
Honestly, who here ever heard about Medium? And of those, how many care?
If by 'creative' you mean substituting another word for 'hits', 'likes', or 'shares', then yes, yes they are.
Who else bets that the frothing-at-the-mouth angry SJW articles (and their right-wing equivalents, I guess) will always get a ton of claps? (Claps? chlamydias? kek!)
This is a good way to marginalize reasonable authors that tell the difficult truths, and pander to the lowest common mob drone from your favourite group of idiots.
And I for one am excited to see where this takes us.
you can pay my robot powered clap generator to generate claps for random text to create a automated eco system to harvest Medium. (Well I won't bother to write it but I am fairly sure others will)
So whoever writes the most drivel that gets the most Facebook postings to drive more people to the site gets all the money each month. A writer could even pay people's subscriptions for a few months, since most of it would come back to them as payment. After building up a small following, they could just keep writing the same drivel and get the same claps, without having to payout the seed money anymore.
It's like a multi-player computer game I played once, based on a small business model. The person who sunk all their money into Research and Development at the start had the most money each round, and then just before the end they sunk all their money into Advertising, and had all the money at the end. After seeing that, that was the only way to play the game if you wanted to win.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
profit!
I doubt if any author wants a case of the clap.
Sorry, best I can do are some jazz hands.
What is the income of a one-handed clap?
... I am waiting.
An anonymous bot service that provides automated "claps" for writers to get paid on articles.
... bots.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... kinda rare.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If this online journal, magazine or news site is paid from ad views, then the fair way to do this is to share a portion of the ad revenue with the authors by views. By instituting a requirement for the viewer to 'clap' the article, they have another opportunity to get paid for an article and ad viewed, but not pay the writers.
this can't possibly be gamed. make america greedier again.
Among logged in users or the like. I'm sure controversial writers like Christopher Hitchens held more people's attention than those who were better liked among their readership.
Echo chambers get boring fast.
It's too easy
I get the clap all the goddamned time. I really should buy stock in Penicillin.
I got a lot of different claps. They told me never get the black claps. I thought that was racist, only I don't think I ever got that one.
and we're giving it to you.
Who's got the clap?
We do!
Finally! a method to monetise all your mumma's herpes and gonorrhoea!!
Thank you, but no.
Now there will be even more contentless feel good self-promotional crap on Hacker News. I never click on a Medium article. It's always a waste of time.
So writers will be rewarded for writing populist articles and not articles that we dont like to hear or care for however important or confronting they may be. Sounds like a recipe for perpetuating wilful ignorance and self-deception. But hey .. if it makes money, feed the masses, Medium for the sheep.
What's the chance the payouts will be determined in a fair, transparent, non-partisan manner?
What's the chance this is just a way for the VC cabal who own Medium to crowdsource some hysterical anti-worker propaganda?
It's not like pay-per-click or 'like' or whatever hasn't been tried before. Probably hundreds have tried it.
Journalism. That's the "problem" in a sense. If you want actual journalism, you need an article that gets 2000 clicks to have the same level of journalistic quality as one that gets 20000000.
Journalism all needs to be of a minimum level of quality. In a free market economy there will be a fair market price for that minimum level.
Unless the pay-per-clap thing is a bonus *beyond* fair market pay, or they set the rates to equal fair market pay intentionally, this will fail as inevitably writers will only do stories that will get a minimum number of clicks. Otherwise it won't be worth their time.
Thank you Dave Raggett
So all the writers have to do is gather a couple of friends to click that stupid button.
You've got the clap!
I'm going to patent, copyright, and whatever the term clap-bait. Maybe I can make more money than Medium in the short term?
Ad-revenue driven websites have been in a race to the bottom, happily abandoning any sort of meaningful content in favor of clickbait that generates revenue. Switching the pay for the writers over to a formula derived from the number of clicks they generate is just the next step in that process.
And I never want to get it again!
Did they even *try* to think that through?
Say goodbye to any topic that is even vaguely controversial.
Say hello to authors that harshly compete with one another, and potentially even start backstabbing one another.
The bottom line is that their quality will sink faster than... a very... fast... sinking... thing. *whistles*. (I was gonna say Trumps career but I'm sure everyone else is as sick to death about just reading that name, as I am...)
Maybe they could have done this as a bonus on top of a basic salary, but not as their entire salary.
This will definitely increase the value and in-depth content of the postings. There's nothing internet readers flock to more than a calm, rational, carefully balanced view of all perspectives of a critical issue.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Feels somehow similar to certain companies (*cough* hostgator *cough) trying to use NetPromoter Score as their sole metric for doling out bonuses/commissions to employees. Dunno if they still do that.
I thought they were asking me to give them crap!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
they've got applause!
"Fist full of yen"