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Claps Are Gone. Medium Partner Program Has Changed
New habits of stats-checking will surely follow
For those of us who are obsessed with checking our Medium stats, the recent changes to the Medium Partner Program mean a whole new routine to adopt. The old system of paying people by the number of claps they have received is gone. It has been replaced by the metric of reading-time. Now, eyeball-minutes mean everything.
I had just got used to the old capping system. Whilst there was never a one-to-one correspondence between claps and payment, I had begun to understand how the peaks and troughs of my clapping figures broadly corresponded to the peaks and troughs of my medium month-end pay packet.
It is true: claps could never be relied upon to predict with any sort of accuracy the dollars and dimes finally totaled up in the month-end figures. It all depended on who clapped, on who else those clappers clapped, and on their overall clapping promiscuity across the platform.
Still, to receive a clap (or round of applause) was to experience a tangible event in your Medium world. I was able to chart a day’s success, or lack of, by the frequency of those little green circles that the platform provides to notify you of such an event. Soon enough, switching on my phone or laptop to witness what would hopefully be…
