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I Am a “Friend of Medium”

But what kind of friend is Medium to me?

John Egelkrout
3 min readJan 14, 2025
Photo by Levi Guzman on Unsplash

I remember when Medium rolled out the “Friend of Medium” campaign. The idea behind it was to generate more revenue to reward those writers we follow and to allow those of us who write to receive higher earnings the same way. I immediately signed on to pay the higher subscription because I felt I should be supporting the platform on which I publish. My earnings were good and I felt like it was the thing to do.

I am reconsidering that position.

I have never been one to put my earnings out there, but I routinely have made north of four figures each month for quite some time. This month? If I crack $100 I will consider it a victory. My earnings were bigger four years ago than they are now, and back then I had less than 1000 followers. Today I have over 8000.

If it was just me, or just a few people here and there I would dismiss it as just being a hiccup, a rough patch of road that will work itself out. But that is not what I am seeing. Instead, I am seeing a large number of writers expressing the same concerns about views and reads, not to mention paltry earnings.

For the past few days, I have been looking at the pieces that come through my feed. Without exception, every piece has an almost laughable number of claps. While their…

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John Egelkrout
John Egelkrout

Written by John Egelkrout

I am a sanity-curious former teacher who writes about politics, social issues, memoirs, and a variety of other topics.

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