Writers should be paid for the quality of their ideas — not the attention they attract for advertisers. That’s why “anyone” can join the Medium Partner Program and earn money when Medium members read their stories.

This is an excerpt from the Medium Partner Program’s onboarding page. First, let’s understand what this program is all about, then we’d go into the flaws around this model.

source https://medium.com/creators

What it is.

Medium as we know it is a free platform for content creation and writing.

As a user, you can register and start creating content for free. The Medium Partner Program, however, pushes this further, this program allows writers (of any category) to create, publish and earn from the content they create.

source https://medium.com/creators

If you’re wondering how to get into the program, it’s pretty straight forward. You’d head over to the program registration page. You should find the link to join the program, where you’re required to agree to terms and Setup Payments.

Payments.

To receive payments, You’d need to set up a Stripe Express account. Even though you’d expect this page would contain multiple payment options, it doesn’t.

There’s just Stripe. Well, that isn’t too much of a problem, unless you’re from Africa (and other regions where Stripe isn’t supported).

“Unless you’re from Africa (and other regions where Stripe isn’t supported)”

Screenshot of countries where Stripe is supported

You’d notice from the screenshot above that not a single country in Africa has support for Stripe.

This is bad considering there’s a huge percentage of writers (on medium) who are from these regions. I am from Nigeria as such not eligible to earn on medium until Stripe is supported in my country. Great.

I understand that Stripe may be working hard to allow support in as many regions as they can, but let’s be realistic, we don’t know how long that’ll take and the dynamics involved when it does happen.

I’d stumbled on this article about how Stripe “quietly” added India to the list of supported countries. As much as that might have given a tiny bit of hope, reading through, it became clear that the terms surrounding the payment aren’t exactly transparent. That’s, however, a different discussion altogether.

Oops.

The Set-Back.

Recently I had gotten an email from Manning Books Publications about an opportunity to publish a book on their platform. I was elated.

I decided to put more attention into writing, and I was going to start with joining the Medium Partner Program. I started the registration process but didn’t go too far as my country wasn’t on the list of supported countries.

If you, however, decide to fill in details of a friend who lives in a supported country, you’d need to also fill in tax details and this involves providing accurate government records, so, you’re still stuck.

Coming back to this:

Writers should be paid for the quality of their ideas — not the attention they attract for advertisers. That’s why “anyone” can join the Medium Partner Program and earn money when Medium members read their stories.

Not just anyone can join the program. If the Medium team intends to make the program available to anyone and everyone, they might want to provide other payment options that support a wider range of countries or perhaps other digital currency solutions - like bitcoin for example.

If this partnership with Stripe is limiting them from adding other payment solutions, then they might want to rethink this relationship and consider the effect it has on their users.

As much as we might want to think this is a medium problem, we do not exactly know the dynamics around their partnership with Stripe and how it limits them.