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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.
It's a newspaper in San Francisco for the LGBTQ2SN community. So it's appropriate that writers get paid based on how many of their readers get the clap.
And of those, how many care?
I care. I am going to sign up as a writer, whip up a Selenium script to "clap" my articles, and then write myself a minivan. If that doesn't work, I will hire clappers on Mechanical Turk.
The truth is very often undesirable and boring. So they will be paying more for artful lies. Want a system that works, treat your audience like children. Give them some pocket play money to spend, a set allowance each time period (longer time periods require more careful thought so 24hour vs 48 hour vs 7 days) and that they can spend with whom they wish. Allow them to earn extra play money by buying stuff with real money and they can spend that play money as they wish. Those authors who they choose to spend their play money with, earn real money. Selling stuff seems to work better than advertising stuff, in the current era. Advertising seems to be spending big to gain very little sales because once you are on the internet, you see and interesting item you might be interested in and you, well, immediately use the internet to compare it to competitors and find it is over priced shite with a big advertising product and you don't buy it. The only advertising that works for me, is when I am actually shopping and something is on special and I check it out (compare with competitors) and that special is actually worthwhile, that is it. Trying to squeeze marketing dollars out of that does not leave much space. Spend more on the product and less on advertising and you are more likely to win the sale.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Appropriately, I've misread a sentence in the summary as "Claps are basically Medium's equivalent of lice". Maybe they should have gone for jazz hands?
Ezekiel 23:20