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I sent Medium's support people a query about a couple of my recent stories that showed vastly different results in the views/reads/fans stats and the surprisingly inverse relationship to the payments I've received from them. (The far more popular story received very little compensation, while the less popular story received a lot more compensation.) I got an interesting reply from them.

First, they said, that the primary "signal" for payments is claps and that time spent reading a story is a secondary signal. ("Reads" can probably be used as a proxy for this.) As we already know, claps and reads only count for payment if they come from members. Non-member claps and reads don't count.

Second, they said that the only place to see claps is on the story itself, where total claps are show, and where you can click the clap count to get a breakdown by member. I didn't realize this, but you can tell who is a member and who is not by looking at the member's image. If it has a green circle around it, they are a member. If not, they aren't. So you can tell, on an individual story basis, how many member claps you've received.

Of course, that doesn't map to pay period. The claps shown are cumulative and don't bear timestamps. It is also rather tedious, once you have a sufficient number of stories published to sift through them to find out how many claps each one is getting. And finally, the total number of claps doesn't mean a great deal, because a member's membership fee is divided up based on all the stories they have clapped for. Someone who gives one clap per story they like has the same effect on payments as someone who gives 10 claps per story they like. (Hopefully most people give more to stories they like better, but you have no real way of telling.)

I offered a suggestion on how they might make payment calculations more transparent. They said they would pass it along to the responsible development team and noted that they've been getting a lot of comments from writers asking for more transparency in how payments are calculated.

If enough writers make enough noise about it, maybe something will eventually change . . .

That’s interesting, thanks Dale.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/...

D.J. wrote: "That’s interesting, thanks Dale."

My pleasure.