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Do You Only Earn if Someone Reads to the End of Your Story?
A debate over views, reads, and member reading time
Recently I had a little dispute with a fellow writer over some information he had imparted in an article here on Medium.
It was an article by Robert Ralph that intended to explain to readers what constituted a “view” and what constituted a “read”. Then, using these definitions, he went on to explain what you do and don’t get paid for.
The problem was, from what I was reading, he had it wrong. And people were feeling deflated and disappointed upon reading this information, for good reason.
Furthermore, he was unable to provide me with an actual source from where he had learnt his facts from.
We have had a lengthy discussion about it. I used some of my own stats to attempt to demonstrate to Robert why I felt his information wasn’t correct, and I explained to him how he could see this kind of information in his own stats. Unfortunately, he declined to do so, preferring “to put it to bed” (in his words).
And so, I decided that I would conduct a little experiment so that I could (a) see for myself that my theory was correct and (b) hopefully demonstrate it to Robert.
