An Open Letter

An Open Letter to Ev Williams, CEO of This Platform

From a concerned writer

Green Chameleon

Dear Ev,

Thank you for creating this lovely, ad-free, user friendly platform, but that's not why I'm here.

I’m here once again to complain about the seemingly biased nature of the medium partner program. I’m writing as a person who has value to give to your platform, a person who really wants to share knowledge on this platform but isn’t getting any reward from it.

It’s upsetting and kind of suspicious how, in this modern day and age, a platform as advanced and popular as medium only relies on one archaic and incompetent payment platform to reward its writers.

For years, you keep telling us you're working on it, you keep telling us you'll get it done yet nothing seems to happen. Are you genuinely working on it? Or do you just love to use stripe as an excuse to not pay writers across the globe? The answer to that question would determine the kind of person you truly are.

One of the things that bugs me the most is that when you're about to pay the subscription fee, there are two payment method; credit card, and PayPal, but when it's time to pay writers, stripe becomes the only payment option. What that means is that you want your platform to be funded from users all over the globe, but you only want to reward a smaller section of writers.

Ev Williams, you can partner with PayPal, you can make PayPal a payment option for users, you just don’t want to. You welcome writers and writing from Australia, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa but only want to reward a few, you want people across the globe to give to your platform, yet you don’t want to give back to people across the globe.

I'm pained, a lot of us are pained, I have a story that's really doing numbers, a story that really blew up but I can't earn a cent from it simply because of my location. It hurts

A lot of you might see this as me being whiny, but the writers getting the shorter end of the stick simply because of their location would understand me right now.

I know this is your company and I have no right to tell you how to run it but it's really not in my nature to see any form of unfairness and just walk away from it.

I'm well aware this might get me penalized but I just don't care, a lot of skilled writers come from regions outside the MPP, don't lose them because of greed.

Yours sincerely,

Ossai Ceejay

Thanks as always for reading, a cup of coffee would be a highly appreciated gesture 😌
https://ko-fi.com/ossaiceejay