Did Medium Crash Their Stats for This New Payout Update — Oct 2025?
The girl who shockwaved me in my last article on the Medium updates
We love to hear news about improving writers’ experience, or certainly anything to do with payouts. But TzeLin Sam addresses a good question: are we going to see lower earnings instead?
Or who is it actually earnings going to come from?
While Medium does not magically come up with extra funds, as they mention, to shift the payout from the general public.
Before we dive deeper into this, I would like to share one of our viral writers and his drop in recent stats since mid-September.
This is an abnormal decline as if someone turned off the tap.
“The Horrors of the Medium Algorithm.”
This looks far more than a horror movie. By looking at the chart, we can see that on the 13th, the stats completely collapse.
2–3 days prior to the shift starting. Even if it went down like a shairstep, it doesn’t look natural.
For those that doesn’t know about Medium, they generally do a big update with the Medium Partner Problem in August or during the Fall season. This time, the announcement was made on Oct 1st.
We know that Medium does not play games with what they are going for an update; what you get is the reality.
So if you see an improvement, you should do more of what is working.
As for Jacob, I don’t know how it can recover, since it has been this way for more than 2 weeks.
We do hope October does bring him some light and keep writing viral articles for our publication.
So is anyone else seeing their stats drop in this degree during Stepmber?
Back to Tze Lin’s concept about how we might see lower earnings.
I guess it’s already happening from the top.
Medium has a habit of doing a large wave of clear-up for whatever reason, to make it harder for a high-performing writer to get traffic or earn the same as before.
While the ones that got hit, we can understand it hurts and is very discouraging, yet what I hope is that Medium does give the fund to the average writer that are attracting more readers from external traffic.
She could be on to something, like in plain sight, the money has to come from somewhere, a shift means someone is not going to earn as much.
This does look like a general announcement before we somehow start facing lower earnings for no reason.
Now you have a reason.
This is not being negative, just the other side of the coin on another article.
We try to stay positive about what this might bring, yet what she mentions is likely going to be true because, like many, I also don’t get much external traffic.
Out of all the articles I wrote, I got like one from last month with some extra traffic from Google. No SEO tricks or anything like that because I have no idea how that works either.
I think I’ll slow down as long as the article before is running, since I want more traffic rather than publish something and get 20–30 reads and stop for no reason.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m going on a plane and am asked for a ticket to see how many reads I am allowed to get. (so I write about Medium to not ask for permissions for distribution)
A good sign that the network distribution is working well, yet on the other hand, every article about Medium seems to be doing twice as well.
Those are indeed limited in traffic, but somehow already get more traffic regardless of which publication I publish them under.
My Recent Stats
If your earnings happen to drop, don’t panic, since this is likely Medium indirectly telling us the earnings will be impacted one way or another.
The last article did really well, but I do have a bad habit of over-publishing.
Since it’s not going to be behind a paywall, it doesn’t really matter to me; I just want the stats to look exciting the next time I look at it.
Earnings are low anyway, so I go for traffic instead. Aren’t you happy to finally see me in your feeds again?
Even a random article I wrote for 15 minutes is doing better than all other articles; I don’t know why, but as long as it still works, I’ll keep showing up with them.
This is more like the true distribution that was supposed to appear, yet it was too bad; it never showed up once with other articles, even the one about writing in general.
But I’ll stick to this plan, since I have nothing better to do for now.
Thanks for Reading
This story was originally published on [Medium] and is cross-posted here for a wider audience.
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