Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter

CEO Tony Stubblebine reined in spending and figured out how to actually reward high quality writing.

In August 2023, Stubblebine announced that, moving forward, anyone who wanted to receive payouts from the Medium partnership program needed to be a paying member themselves. The thinking behind this decision was that it jettisoned all the “growth hackers” who didn’t have skin in the game. “If you aren’t part of the Medium community, you tend not to understand what does well,” he explained. “You don’t engage with people. I think part of what makes Medium valuable is getting to talk to the writers themselves [in the comments section]. Everything we were reading on Medium felt more high quality, more valuable if the person was actually active on Medium.”

Next, Stubblebine needed a way to identify the highest quality content published by Medium’s writers and get it in front of the platform’s users, and the only way to do that, in his view, was to insert more humans into the curation process. “I think a lot of people think an algorithm can judge quality,” he said. “And I just think that they’re wrong.”

Of course, relying entirely on volunteers would still make the partnership program vulnerable to gaming, so Medium also employs a staff of about 30 curators whose job it is to comb through these publications and “Boost” the best writing. A Boosted article is not only weighted higher by the recommendation algorithm, but also receives a higher payout. “It could be like a 4X multiplier on the payment,” Stubblebine said. “So the biggest payments are going to stories that are boosted, and that means we’re much more likely to be paying for something that two levels of human editors looked at and loved.”