Yes good point, to me it’s about the market fundamentals of Medium. From 2017–2019 there was continuous audience growth, lots of new leads coming to Medium. This would create a steady flow of new paid members, lots of new readers coming in. So it was a goldmine for writers.

During the past 12 months the growth in new leads stopped. Meanwhile, from what I can tell, the growth in writer numbers is still rising and rising — drawn by the success of people who started writing here between 2016–2019.

So there’s growing supply of content (even without increasing numbers of new writers this would be the case, since current writers keep writing, plus legacy content), but not the growth in demand from readers to keep up.

My best guess is that Medium’s algorithm is spreading the readers eyeballs around as best it can, to spread out the revenue between the growing number of writers. The bigger writers and pubs are the ones losing out the most from this.

Article coming soon!