A New Medium Policy You Didn’t Know
If you write about Medium or use AI, you could lose your Partner Program benefits. Here’s what you should know.
This morning, I received an email from Medium regarding a post I had published five days earlier. In that post, I explained how to use Medium’s new metrics feature, but apparently, they weren’t pleased with the content.
It appears I violated a Medium policy I was completely unaware of, which seemed particularly surprising since I regularly see people writing about Medium — and most of those articles are behind paywalls.
It turns out that since April (not that long ago), we can no longer publish content about Medium and put it behind a paywall. Additionally, this same new policy prohibits paywalling stories written by AI. Medium may send you a warning, as they did with me, but they could also terminate your Partner Program participation.
I am just writing this so that more people are aware of these polices.
Paywalled content eligibility
The following types of content are not allowed to be locked behind the paywall for earning in the Partner Program. Stories in violation of this policy will be removed from the paywall:
Stories that are primarily focused on Medium, the Medium Partner program, or the mechanics of Medium (aka “meta” content)
There’s one thing everyone here has in common — Medium, and our passion for it. It makes sense that we all want to talk about it, and analyze it, and write about it.
However, the intended purpose of the Medium Partner Program is to provide the Member audience with the best writing on the internet covering the widest variety of topics.
Meta stories have always been set to “network only” distribution in our system. We have discovered that Medium-focused stories are not of wide general Member interest, and despite potential short-term financial gains in your earnings from other Partners, they can have long-term negative impact on your audience. You don’t want to limit your reach by being muted or blocked by any potential readers.
You are free to write anything you want about Medium outside the paywall — successes, strategies, criticisms, and updates.
Fully-generated artificial intelligence (AI) writing
We define AI-generated writing as writing where the majority of the content has been created by an AI-writing program with little or no edits, improvements, fact-checking, or changes. This does not include AI writing tools such as AI outlining, or AI assisted fact, spelling, or grammar checkers.
For more information, please see our Artificial Intelligence (AI) content policy
Below is part of the email I received. I’m writing this because after doing some quick research, I found that many people are still putting Medium-related content behind paywalls, so it would be helpful to know about this policy before getting called out.
Therefore, stories published after April 1, 2025 that are primarily about Medium, the Medium Partner Program, or general Medium features are not eligible for paywalling and monetization.
Please do not lock any stories about Medium going forward. You don’t need to unlock stories published prior to April 1, 2025 but if you have already done so, please do not re-lock them.
You can still write about these topics as non-paywalled stories. You can paywall stories generally about “writing,” social media, platforms, and other related topics. This policy is specifically regarding content about Medium.
Repeated violations of this policy may result in permanent ineligibility to participate in the Partner Program.Please let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Medium Partner Program
