Final Departures

Some sad news, and a goodbye post, several weeks in advance of the actual goodbye.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

A person in a ghost costume waves goodbye. They’re on some sort of very high cliff overlooking a lake, so clearly they died in Nature.
Here’s me at my other newsletter platform. Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

I’m writing this on a plane crossing the Atlantic Ocean. I’m in the dead center of the cabin — no windows or aisles on either side, only people — but if I could see out the window, I know I would see only ocean and only sky. I’m in between places, which feels like being nowhere, and that seems like a good place to start this post: I’m leaving Medium.

The terms of my contract with Medium have changed a few times, in the roughly eight (eight!) years I’ve been here, but since the summer of 2020, the deal has been that I get a monthly advance of a little over two thousand dollars, based on projected traffic, plus whatever I earn over that amount through traffic itself. For the record, I’ve out-earned my advance every month. The program itself, though, is ending. I’ll keep filing this column more or less weekly until the end of the year, and then — along with every other writer on the program, as far as I understand it — I’ll be done.

This isn’t a surprise. Medium famously changes models a lot, from publication to open-platform and back again. In the past year, I’ve seen several friends leave, including Katelyn Burns, who has a huge following, and John DeVore, who was here long before me. If they were leaving, all of us were in…

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Responses (8)

What are your thoughts?

Why not stay on without the stipend? It seems like with 20k followers you could still make money. The new Boost program and the way they count reads now has resulted in more $ for many. And maybe you could double publish on Ghost? Just a thought. I’m glad you’re grateful and had a good run. I like to read your stuff!

since the summer of 2020, the deal has been that I get a monthly advance of a little over two thousand dollars, based on projected traffic, plus whatever I earn over that amount through...

Thanks for your transparency. I had no idea Medium was still contracting directly with writers; I had - perhaps naïvely - thought that all of us were writing "on spec" at this point. I'm not sure what to think about this.
As a fellow trans writer…...

I enjoy your writing and insights and look forward to following wherever you go. You will be wildly successful. You don't see it now, but in order to have the success the universe wants to gift you, it needs to force you to drop that which is holding you back.