No one can get away from Google’s traffic distribution
It’s not just that, but Medium is not likely to change this anytime soon.
This article is written after taking a brief dive into Medium’s recent website traffic vs the months before.
From this, you can see the storyline of how Medium has been running for the past 5 years.
I came onto Medium in late 2023, as you can see from the chart, it correlates with my earnings from that time.
If you use the bull and bear approach to the chart from the beginning of 2024, of you can say during around August 2023, then changes in the Medium pay rate system have already brought in more traffic than it ever did for most of 2023.
The update of the Medium Partner Program in August 2023 changed everything. Average writers were finally seeing their earnings and audience reach a new height for many.
This includes me, as my longer article on this part is that Medium is more of a reactive mode than it is actually leading.
In other words, if they do not get traffic, then they are less likely to get more paid readers/subscribers, which means Medium is not going to make any more profits, so the pay to writers will be lower as well.
2025 Google Broad Core Update (or some other names)
Based on
’s update to me last time, Google has updated its traffic to website 2 times, once right during the big earnings drop in January 2025 and another in July.
And in August, somehow, the earnings just crashed for no reason.
The numbers do not lie, and they tell a story.
Although Medium can not tell the future of their traffic, they can likely prepare for it since they see the internal numbers live, along with policy updates from Google.
Now I know what the 2 senior engineers were for.
If Medium was fighting a scammer and lost some earnings, how are they able to hire or looking to fire 2 new senior engineers?
The answer is, what if they can help project and understand what Google’s new updates are and how they will impact them as a website?
Was going to save that for the longer article, but I can say it again, since the distribution here is just not what it used to be, at least for most writers.
Medium has to adjust its payout based on the money coming in, and the number indicator is the traffic that is coming into Medium.
You can see from the chart all the way above, it’s not looking good.
This also answers why Medium is writing an article about why a Medium reader or writer should know why Medium is better than Substack in many places, as they claim.
A platform is only as good as its use case for each account; there is no one-size-fits-all situation here.
Recently, Medium has also updated us on the use of AI in articles and what they think and do about AI-generated content.
I can tell you that this has a lot to do with distribution, not totally about AI.
Why is technology and AI-related content still going to be the leader?
This really has to do with the traffic Medium receives again.
We are not talking about being boosted by Medium, but the organic traffic of all kinds.
I’m sure more readers are reading about technology and AI than most topics, and Google is probably very favorite of that content.
Basically, they are the ads as traffic to Medium is a form of result after the articles on Medium are seen by the readers.
If a technology-related topic is not doing well, Medium overall will not do well.
You can see from the recent July 2025, Medium has once again reached that 5M in traffic to a near record low, the charge includes August, but the month is not over, so it should be higher than July.
But still, Medium is near a record low, which perfectly reflects the recent earnings boost back to the June rate.
I see that Medium was worried a bit at the start of August, when we saw record lows in earnings.
Now do you see how Medium is reactive to the earnings with the traffic that it gets, and also plan a little ahead in case the traffic really crashes?
And that’s why they are worried about Substack, even when they are not saying it; action speaks louder than words.
I don’t think in a million years a competitor would give free traffic to others unless you are talking them down. (Did that happen? Idk, you can think for yourself.)
By the way, the article I put technology as a topic, somehow earns a little more, which could be just luck.
I think I have to stop here, as I’ll be going too far off topic even though it’s related. I would like to write another article about it, if I have the time to, you know, I have limited time for each session of my writing, and I like to do it in one go.
Thanks for Reading
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