Medium’s new approach to writers making money

From the Medium blog:

Today we’re launching the first step of an exciting new phase at Medium.

We strongly believe that quality content needs to be paid for by consumers — not advertisers — so creators can do their best work, and to align the incentives of everyone involved. So, since March, we’ve been experimenting with our subscription paywall and putting more and more great stories behind it. But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of fantastic stories published on Medium every day. And, though Medium is an open publishing platform, we haven’t enabled a way for most of our writers to participate in the economics.

Until now.

In a nutshell, Medium is updating their Partner Program to allow writers to be paid by engagement. And how is that engagement measured?

For the creators in the program, each month you will be paid based on the level of engagement your stories get from Medium members. Essentially, we look at the engagement of each individual member (claps being the primary signal) and allocate their monthly subscription fee based on that engagement. This is one of the reasons we love Claps — it helps us measure the depth of appreciation that a member has for each individual post. (For our members, we’re excited to give you more meaningful control over the stories you support. The more claps you give a locked post, the more share of your membership fee that author will get.)

To me, this move was inevitable. The question is, will this amount to more than pennies for all but the most widely read authors? Reminiscent of the music streaming model.