I understand Jonathan Greene and I actually didn’t know about a lot of the stuff you just mentioned.

But let me just show you a few of the tweets/emails/messages I’ve gotten over the last week alone:

Me, personally? I made $300 last week alone. But I have 22k followers so this doesn’t really take the little guy into account — that’s true. But all of the screenshots I showed above? They’re from people with less than 3k followers. Two of them less than 2k.

Clearly something is occurring on Medium lately in particular. You chalk it up to more competition, but I’m chalking it up to a change in the algorithm.

Write some locked stories and see what happens — you’ll get your views back.

There was one thing that got me a little worried though.. I saw in a locked post recently that there was a call to action at the bottom with a link to a book. That’s probably what you’re talking about with Penguin?

It’s weird that everybody else has to play by the rules but then someone else who doesn’t give a damn about Medium can come in and put a CTA at the bottom to a book. It’s just weird to me.

The MPP would be infinitely better if we could just include a CTA at the bottom — but that’s a subject for another day.

I mean, it’s worrisome. I’ll give you that — it’s definitely worrisome to see what’s happening, but I’m looking at all this from more of a gratitude standpoint. I’m not saying you aren’t, but I guess the gratitude for me is overwhelming any other feeling I’m having.

It’s sort of like a great spot to travel to just got a flood of tourists coming in or something and has somewhat ruined the vibe. I get it.

And to keep with this analogy it’s easy for me to be okay with the flood of tourists when I have a lot of “real estate” already (in this case followers). But what I’m saying is, there’s still other places to build. There’s still a disproportionate amount of opportunity to me. In fact, I think there’s a lot of stuff we aren’t taking into consideration just yet. I don’t think it’s widely known that Medium’s pushing more locked stories this month. Like, a TON more. If people knew that, they’d be making a lot of money right now.

But I’m just happy we had it for as long as we did. And I don’t even think this is the end for Medium. I’ve never seen my Partner Program earnings higher!

I think the main thing Medium wants is better content and more users. They may be wanting bigger publishers to come on and publish solely on Medium or something. That would be crazy to convince the Washington Post to publish solely on Medium. I don’t think it will ever happen but they may be able to take the success story of a few WashPo articles and convince other smaller publishers to make the switch.

Sort of like they did back in the day with the Ringer, etc.

But the overarching thing for me is that there’s still a ton of opportunity. I’m seeing writers make HUNDREDS of dollars A MONTH right now. Excuse my language but that’s fucking ridiculous.

Thank you Medium, seriously, thank you.