Nicolas Cole made $100,000 a year reposting his own articles behind Medium's paywall between 2016 and 2020. Medium's system didn't detect duplicates, so his old hits kept attracting readers and generating royalties. The platform eventually warned him to stop or face a ban.
Medium was incredible. Not only could you get really amazing distribution on Medium, but they also were starting to ramp up their paywall program. Their paywall program was when you would write a piece, you could choose, do I want this to be available to the public, or do I want to put this behind the paywall and basically get paid a royalty based on viewership and engagement? So the same way that a music artist might get paid per stream on Spotify, that's what Medium was trying to build. They raised a bunch of money to do it. And they ramped up the program. And the thing that I figured out is that they didn't even care and they didn't have the infrastructure to check whether or not the same pieces were getting published behind the paywall. Meaning I took my entire library and everything that I had written on Medium up to that point, and I just copy-pasted them behind Medium's paywall. I got 10 times more viewership because I had an insane library to just keep leveraging. And because I was playing the hits and I was just posting bangers, I got paid on all of those. So from 2016 to 2020, I think I was probably making $100,000 a year just copy-pasting all of my old articles to the point where Medium ended up emailing me saying, if you keep doing this, we will have to ban your account. We will have to take you off of the platform because I had figured out how to basically game their system.
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