How the 100 Follower Requirement Changed Medium and User Habits

And why this is a net positive for Medium, writers, and readers.

As you might have noticed these past few months, after the announcement that to be eligible for the Medium Partner program, you must have a minimum of 100 followers by the end of 2021 and must have also published at least 1 story, there have been quite a lot of articles about getting quick followers. Adding to this, inactive users will be removed from the program if there is no activity within a 6-month timeframe which just added to the feeling of urgency.

Now, this is quite an interesting requirement. From the surface, this is just your usual minimum requirements threshold that is needed to get into the program. Nothing revolutionary, in fact, this is similar to YouTube’s new monetization policy where you need 4000 hours of watch time and 1000 subscribers before you can monetize your videos. The only difference is we don’t have a requirement for X number of claps or read articles.

But looking deeper, Medium is tackling a problem that it had. A feature people didn’t fully utilize. Something that maybe readers used, but writers, who are, in my mind, the biggest part of this platform, didn’t. It was followers. While subjective, looking at upcoming and even big, often curated writers, their follower count wasn’t all that high. In fact, people generally didn’t really bother to follow someone if they liked the article that they just read. People followed publications and certain types of stories, not people. Imagine following Vox on YouTube, but not the independent journalists’ channels.

If you go on YouTube, most smaller channels will almost always ask you to ‘’Like, comment and subscribe’’. Have you ever really seen an article where the author comments “and remember to clap, save and follow?’’ Of course not.

That all changed however with the new requirement. Medium’s community is rather tight and helpful to each other. It was no surprise that something like the topic “100 followers” came up…

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