Nicolas Cole made hundreds of thousands of dollars by copying his viral Quora answers to Medium between 2017 and 2019. Medium's royalty system paid per view with weak duplicate detection, so he reposted the same content repeatedly until the platform caught on and banned him.
Medium, they raised a bunch of money, and the founder of Medium was one of the former co-founders of Twitter. Most people don't know that. In 2017, Medium really hit my radar, and I started cross-posting things that I had written on Quora over to Medium. At the time, Medium was pouring a bunch of money into scaling up their paywall program. Their paywall program was intended to be the Spotify of articles on the internet. Based on how many views and how much engagement your article got behind the paywall, they would pay you like a very small royalty on that, the same way that artists get paid instead of getting paid a fraction of a penny per stream, you would get paid a fraction of a penny per view or per engagement. What they didn't think about, and what I figured out, is that they didn't have a good way of checking for duplicate content. Meaning, what I could do is I could take my entire library from Quora and republish it over and over and over again behind Medium's paywall. So I would take my top 100 or 200 most viral Quora answers, and every day, just copy-paste a new one behind Medium's paywall. And from 2017 to like 2019, Medium ended up paying me out like hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties until eventually they sent me an email and they were like, "We see what you're doing. You can't do that anymore. We're gonna ban you." And I was like, "Okay, that's fine."
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