Medium Boost Is Mysteriously Making Me 10x More Money

Will this meta-story about the boost get boosted?

Alberto Romero
6 min readFeb 5, 2024
Some numbers from two January articles — do you see anything weird?

The numbers above are as surprising as they’re real.

The first article has been read almost 2x more than the second but it has earned 5x less!

I don’t ever write on Medium about Medium but this situation is asking for an explanation.

What’s going on?

Is the boost only about getting more views?

You may have noticed that the second story, the half-read-but-5x-earned one, was boosted by Medium’s team of curators (thanks!). As far as I know, the boost feature only does one thing.

It gets your article more early views. That’s it.

500 more views at the very least during the first week, as CEO Tony Stubblebine wrote, up to 100,000. Even the lower end of that incredibly large range is often enough to cross the inflection point and drive further growth to your stories.

Views are heavily correlated with reads, reading time, and so on — the main markers of success for Medium stories — and therefore earnings.

More views = more earnings.

So far so good.

Full disclosure: I like…

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