Medium has just announced the first in a series of coming updates to the Partner Program.
This is quite exciting.
For the next six months, small but important changes will be introduced at the start of each month (I suspect).
The first one, effective today, October 1, 2025, directly addresses one of the most common requests from writers: why doesn’t Medium reward external traffic?
Well, ask no more.
Now it does!
What’s changing?
- 5% of Partner Program payouts are being redirected to stories that bring in readers from outside of Medium. That means traffic from social media shares, search engines, newsletters, and direct links will carry more weight in payouts. That’s a cool thing, even though it’s just 5%. It’s a good start.
- Paywalled stories will now earn from external readers. If someone who isn’t a Medium member lands on a paywalled story, the writer gets paid for that visit. If that person then signs up as a member after hitting the paywall, the writer earns even more. Like the idea. We’ll see how it works in reality.
Why this matters
Until now, external traffic didn’t count toward earnings unless it converted in very specific ways.
For many writers, that meant their effort in promoting stories beyond Medium had little financial impact.
With this update, the platform is acknowledging that bringing in new readers and potential members is valuable, and rewarding that behavior directly.
For writers, this opens up new strategies:
- Promoting stories on social platforms is finally useful
- SEO-focused stories that attract search traffic could see higher payouts, which makes Google traffic a completely new game
- Paywalling stories becomes a stronger option since non-member traffic now counts, although I still want to know more details on how this will actually work.
The Bottom Line
What a day. October 1st.
This update shifts the incentive structure quite a bit. To me, this might be the biggest Medium update yet (apart from the introduction of the partner program way back).
Writers who share their work widely and attract new audiences to Medium will benefit. And I love that because it’s a win-win. We benefit. Medium benefits.
External is also a big deal because Medium has a huge domain authority and ranks pretty well in search engines. That means getting traffic from there is much easier than n a blog of your own that has low domain authority.
Medium’s future looks bright (again).