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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.
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.
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.
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.