Is writing on Medium still worth it? (BIG change for 2026)

Over the past 3 years, I’ve spent a good chunk of my spare time writing on Medium.com.

And for a lot of that time, it was highly lucrative.

I made more than $60,000 sharing my thoughts on a wide range of topics, from general economic news to dividend stock investing to general productivity tips to quitting the bad habits that had plagued me for most of my adult life.

There was so much to love about the blogging site, including writer-friendly design and UX and, perhaps most importantly, the fact you could start getting paid for your work almost immediately.

As such, each year I would post a newsletter article and YouTube review that sought to answer the question:

• Is writing on Medium still worth it?

And each and every year from 2023-2025, my answer was a resounding YES.

But this fall, something wild happened that, sadly, caused me to change my opinion for the first time since joining there in 2022.

Is writing on Medium still worth it in 2026?

In this post, I’ll explain exactly what happened, why I think some writers should now pass on the platform altogether, and what I’m doing in the new year instead.

The big crash

To say things were chugging along for me in the fall would be putting it mildly.

After spending the better part of a year bouncing around between $1,000-$2,000 per month in earnings, I suddenly burst through the plateau in a big way in the spring.

Here’s a look at at what happened:

All of this positive momentum had me on the precipice of reaching a goal I’d always dreamed of but thought to be all but impossible: $10,000 USD in earnings in a single month.

Being able to make a living writing on Medium had always been a dream of mine, and for the first time since before a brutal Medium Partner Program update in August 2023, it looked like it might actually be possible.

October started with a bang and had me trending toward that elusive 10K number when, all of a sudden, around Oct. 11, everything fell apart.

I couldn’t make sense of it.

I’d spent 3 years grinding away at building a 600-article back catalogue of work and promoting the site on YouTube and Substack, and Medium simply … turned off internal distribution for my work.

I wrote a polite email to support, asking them to have a look at what might have happened and maybe give me an explanation.

It was simply statistically impossible for my numbers to do what they were doing without some kind of intervention or glitch.

And I was still drawing almost 1,000 external views per day from non-subscribers (Google search, Substack links, etc.).

At first, I worried that I’d somehow run afoul of some rule or policy and wanted to know how I could rectify it.

Twice in the past I’d been caught up in an overzealous spam filter for no reason at all, and twice Medium fixed it within the day.

Medium is also undergoing a multi-month tweak of how it pays writers under the Medium Partner Program, and oftentimes when this happens there are wild swings in pay and distribution while everything gets sorted out.

But this didn’t seem to be affecting anyone else.

Nobody was talking about it this time.

I had to laugh when I got Medium support’s reply a short time later.

No explanation, no fix, just a form letter that explained I should take a long view of Medium earnings. They also provided some tips for success (!).

Again, I’d been a top writer on the site for years and once hosted a popular YouTube channel that meted out … tips for writing on Medium.

About a month later, with no recovery in sight, I reached out to support again.

This time, they just ghosted me completely.

I couldn’t help but feel personally targeted.

But I would later discover that this was something of a pattern.

Top writer slowly builds momentum, explodes to the next level, appears headed for a major payout, and then sees the spigot turned off overnight.

Let me give you two more examples.

Does Medium purposely (or inadvertently) throttle top writers?

I started to wonder if I’d become so good at Medium that the site felt it couldn’t afford me anymore.

Which seems weird.

On platforms like YouTube, top creators are promoted and celebrated. Same goes for Substack.

The difference, though, is that YouTube is ad-supported and Substack is supported by subscriptions to specific writers, whereas Medium lives on subscriptions to the site itself.

Medium has a weird vibe sometimes.

Although I loved the platform and I’ve always been a big booster, I’ve also kind of always been a little scared to do too well.

Back when I started in 2022, a writer named Tim Denning was Medium.

He became so good at it, and his readers so valued his motivational and business writing, that the algorithm couldn’t help but flood your feed with his work.

Another very successful writer at the time by the name of Eve Arnold wrote similar stuff.

Then, all of the sudden, the powers that be seemingly decided Medium was too highbrow for that sort of thing and slashed pay and distribution for that type of content.

Tim last published on Medium in late 2024 and now writes the same type of content on Substack. Eve Arnold has all but disappeared.

Which brings me back to … me.

Shut down

Meanwhile, I was one of the few top writers who didn’t quit after several partner program and distribution tweaks made it a lot harder to earn.

I resolved at the time to shift toward content that Medium seemingly wanted and set the audacious goal of adjusting to a 50% cut in pay by doubling my views.

And, crazily enough, I pulled it off!

Now, instead of writing health and make money online content, I focused on business and personal finance.

I got better and better at everything from topics to story structure to image selection to headline writing, all of which spurred long read times and tons of comments.

Effectively, I did everything Medium said it wanted and published the kind of human-written, original content that a serious platform should value greatly.

My retention numbers (80-90%) were outstanding, which suggested I was delivering on what I promised with said headlines, and my work always generated a ton of engagement.

In other words, I should have been Medium’s dream contributor.

And yet, in October and with a massive payday on the horizon, they shut me down.

It turns out, I’m not the only one.

What happened to my account?

In the weeks following the destruction of my account, I happened upon an eerily similar story by another writer named Jacob Wilkins.

The pattern was the same:

• Writer build some momentum
• Writer sees explosive growth to start the month
• Medium rug-pulls writer’s distribution

You can read the full post here, but I’ve included a screen cap showing how the exact same thing happened to him a month before it happened to me:

Seeing this and my own stats, I recalled a conversation I had with another top Medium creator who quit the site back in the spring.

At the time, the writer send me a pic of their stats and, well, look what happened:

As if that weren’t bad enough, a reader of mine on Medium let me know the other day that, when you do an author search for my 42,000-follower, Friend of Medium account, it doesn’t show up in the results.

Again, I gave Medium a couple of opportunities to explain what had happened – even requested a media relations contact if Support couldn’t respond – and have yet to hear back.

It’s unfortunate and, as we learned during Medium’s last partner program fiasco in January of 2025, also a huge mistake.

If you don’t communicate changes, people fill the void with all sorts of conspiracy theories.

It’s why I still wonder if Medium shut me down because I got too good at making money there.

If not, why not just explain what happened?

It’s also just the honorable thing to do.

I gave 3 years of my life and 600 articles to Medium. I felt like the least they could do is tell me what happened.

If Medium ever gets back to me, I’ll be sure to update this post.

Who is Medium for in 2026?

Would I still consider writing for Medium if they let me out of distribution jail?

I think it’s possible, because the things that make Medium great are still there:

1. The design and content management system: Clean, easy to understand, and user-friendly.
2. There’s a low bar for entry: All you really need is a laptop, an internet connection, and a $5 per month membership at the site to get started. The distribution (when it works) ensures your work is seen by others, and the comments and clapping function allow you quickly build a community in small, enthusiastic subniches. If you are starting from scratch, it probably still makes sense. But it should be used mostly as a springboard to more serious platforms that support top creators.
3. You can start getting paid right away: In my opinion, this has always been the most important feature. In order to start making money from ads on YouTube, for example, you need to drum up 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. This took me 11 months on my channel, and I’m led to believe that’s pretty fast. And on Substack, you’re basically on your own. If you can’t draw in your own subscribers, you’ll never make a dime. Grinding out a decent following could take years.

As such, Medium is still probably the best choice for beginner-stage creators who don’t have an audience and are looking to practice their writing skills.

It’s why you see a lot of English-as-a-second-language writers on Medium from countries that benefit from a strong U.S. dollar exchange.

It’s also an OK option for marketers thanks to Medium’s strong domain authority and search traffic.

Like I said, I still get 500-1000 views per day from external sources.

But if you’re a serious, professional creator like me, why would you invest the time if you know there’s an artifical cap on your success?

It’s a question I’m wrestling with right now.

What I’m doing instead in 2026

Sometimes, the universe is doing you a solid when it looks and feels like a punch in the face.

The truth is, I always felt like I was on borrowed time at Medium.

It’s why I worked my butt off that first year to get monetized on YouTube as a backup plan.

But the golden handcuffs were comfy indeed, and I do regret not hustling harder to build a bigger following on Substack, grow that YouTube channel, and launch my own website.

I called myself an entrepreneur, but in retrospect, I wasn’t really an entrepreneur at all.

I was a sharecropper.

I was a modular home owner on rented land.

And when you take that risky route, there’s always a chance the boss could kick you off the property.

It’s why I always told my wife that, even though I was pulling in thousands of extra dollars per month, we couldn’t afford to change our budget. We had to act as if that money could disappear overnight.

Sure enough, it did.

When the Medium spigot closed, I was catatonic for the better part of a month.

But now I feel re-energized. And here’s what I doing with that newfound motivation.

• My new website, plusevnews.com, will be the original home for much of my work. My goal is to get it monetized with ads within a month.
• I am ramping up my work on YouTube again. My main channel is here (and I hope you subscribe!)
• I’m upping my Substack presence from 1 newsletter to 3 in order to separate my content into the proper buckets. Publish Every Day will still be focused on making money online. Clean Productivity will be the home of my quit caffeine, quit alcohol, and productivity work, and Pure Dividends will focus on my investment writing.
• I’ll be publishing more products and books on Amazon KDP, so stay tuned on that front too. My current product, a productivity notebook/tool called The Power To-Do List (that’s an affiliate link), is something I’m very proud of and use every day.

To be totally honest, I’m still mourning the end of my relationship with Medium.

I loved that site with all my heart and sung its praises for 3 years.

But what’s left to do when someone stops loving you back?

In these moments, I’m always reminded of a scene from one of the greatest T.V. shows of all time, Mad Men.

The lead character, Don Draper, visits his protégé, Peggy, in the hospital. She’s made a decision that could end her career and doesn’t know what to do. She’s panicking.

“I don’t know” is her response to almost everything Don asks.

Finally, Don stares at her with the deepest intensity to ensure she’s listening and says in a low tone: “Get out of here and move forward.”

Whenever my wife and I get discombobulated about something challenging in life, we pull out the Don Draper quote and delivery.

“MOVE FORWARD.”

Thank you, Don, for that umpteenth reminder.

Now let’s get back to work.