When to Place Medium’s Membership Referral and Subscription Links at the End of Your Articles

Let the green and blue graph lines be your guide.

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash

Medium does a terrific job at providing statistical data for writers about their articles. The separation of readers that are external versus internal matters more than you think.

Green is internal while blue is external for amount of views

For a while, I didn’t understand the relevance between the green and blue lines until I carefully saw that green could represent more readers who are in the Partner Program (internal views have a higher chance of possibly being paying members).

And those are the readers that writers earn their earnings from respectively.

Since Medium now has “Audience Development,” writers can add a link at the end of their articles to promote subscriptions and Partner Program referrals. However, it is important we do not confuse the two (before a subscriber would be considered someone who is paid the monthly or annual fee for unlimited content access).

So, let’s unofficially define what a subscriber versus a member is here on the platform.