I’m Bowing Out for Now, Maybe for Good
Medium is no longer viable for me
Update: 1/9/24. Well, it’s the first day of September. I cancelled my membership in August and this morning, all my articles have been removed from the paywall. I made just short of $20USD in August, ironic that fully half of that came from this article.
I’ve been on Medium since 2021. Back then it was a good place to share personal stories and monetise them. I wrote about being a childfree man from the start and challenging the assumptions about our life experiences. Many people still think childfree men are never challenged even though they have never, and would never, ask childfree men about our experiences.
My aim was to redress many of these erroneous beliefs and highlight the stereotypes and misinformation about us, often spread within a childfree community.
When I came out as demisexual in 2022, it was the natural choice not just to write about it, but advocate for ace and aro people while I was still coming out and processing a lot of past experiences. Aspect people are some of the least understood and represented experiences in the queer community. I set up a publication — The Ace Space — and started welcoming other aspec writers.
Most of my writing here has been a labour of love. I never expected to make a huge income, and I watched it steadily increase towards $100 per month through 2023 with delight even knowing some were making ten times this much.
I stuck with the endless algorithm tinkering, and the back and forth over how writers were paid, and waited patiently for some stability. After all, this was still a labour of love and so long as I was getting more money out than I was putting in, things were fine. It was a good distraction from my mundane research heavy client work and something to do when I was between fiction projects.
But events of the last few months have made me reconsider. I took a month break in April for my mental health (that and I was preparing for my holiday to the Greek island of Kos). I was burnt out. I started writing here again at the end of May, but my views and earnings had completely collapsed. I was back down to around $15 per month. Still a profit, but a tiny one.
Until this month. Despite finding renewed passion through June and July, my earnings were $28 for June and $26 for July.
So far, halfway through August, they are a little over $7 with $4.02 of that from legacy referrals. At this projection, I will likely make $10 for August Couple that with the banner that appears every day when I open Medium begging me to upgrade to the Friends of Medium plan all the while restricting both my views and my income.
No. Just no.
I am a small business, and I cannot afford to make a loss on my writing. Furthermore, I no longer have the energy to spend half a day drafting an article that will earn me $0.25, four external reads, and one internal. The lack of income is frustrating, but it’s the lack of views that make me wonder why I still bother. I read recently that a long-term writer with decades of experience who queried tanking views and income was told in a copypasta email that their cadence isn’t good enough even though that isn’t the question they asked.
I was furious.
This didn’t happen to me, but the ongoing dismissiveness of it was another straw.
After getting an email this week about a big publication leaving and heading to Substack (and the deeply concerning article that was the final straw for that publication), the gaslighting, the issues over boost nominators, and the constant begging to upgrade to Friend of Medium (which I would have done if my earnings had gone up through the spring and, not down), I’m done.
I’ve just cancelled my membership. It was due to renew on Monday 19th August. From September 2024, all my stuff here will be free to read. Some of it will shift to my blog over time, the rest will stay here until a) I decide to leave completely or b) something at Medium changes.
I refuse to keep throwing money at a company that expects writers to be perfectly fine with spending a whole day on an article to earn just 50c from it.
The Ace Space stays for now. The audience is small, granted, but I know people enjoy reading about our experiences. It’s been valuable to helping me come out and find confidence in being demisexual. I know a few others have questioned their sexuality in light of people like me and Rachel writing about ours.
So do keep submitting your stories. And if you’re a regular Ace Space writer (or asexual/aromantic spectrum) and would like to become an editor, please let me know in the replies.
Where else can you find me on the web?
I am now back blogging regularly at my website. I occasionally cover LGBTQIA+ issues, but it’s mostly musings about my fiction writing with some other stuff. While everything there is free to read, I kindly ask you consider adding a few proverbial coins into my tip jar which I include at the end of every blog post.
I am an indie author so you can find all my books at Amazon
On social media too: BlueSky, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.
Thank you, and I really hope to see you on any of these platforms.
