Partner Program changes are rolling out now

However, we have to delay support for India, Brazil, and Thailand

Two weeks ago, we announced changes to our Partner Program.

The response to our announcement has been extremely gratifying. Readers and writers on Medium seem excited that we are taking a stance on encouraging quality writing and actively discouraging content mills, AI-generated articles, and content that is meant only to grab attention.

Today, the following changes have rolled out:

• The new payment calculation is live and now factors in high read ratios, reads by your followers, and Boosts. It will form the basis of how you are paid for people that read your stories from August 1st onward.
• You no longer need 100 followers to qualify for the Partner Program and now simply need to be a Medium member.
• Our Partner Program now supports nine more countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Malta, and the United Arab Emirates.
• Soon, likely within days, we’ll also release an updated Story Stats page with breakdowns for views, reads, and engagements from members.

If you’re not in the Partner Program and want to check your eligibility, start here.

Unfortunately, we have to delay our support for India, Brazil and Thailand. We had said we’d support them today and we were wrong. This support is long overdue and nobody here is happy that we weren’t able to deliver. I absolutely know how many great authors are in those countries and how much they deserve to participate in the rewards of our Partner Program.

The delay is, regrettably, necessary. In the spirit of transparency, I’ll try my best to explain why.

Every country has slightly different laws, conditions, and quirks for transferring money to their local banks. Some countries have conditions around the minimum amount that can be transferred or withdrawn. Some have different minimum payout thresholds. To manage these complexities, the Partner Program integrates with Stripe to help us manage the otherwise unmanageable number of variations and exceptions that exist for each of these countries. Stripe specializes in this, allowing us to specialize in what we are good at: tools for reading and writing.

In order for us to support payouts to additional countries, we’re going to need to move to a different Stripe system that requires a processor fee on every payout. This will involve a slightly different flow for connecting your bank account to our system, and will mean that we will need to limit transfers to a minimum payout amount of at least $10 (possibly higher in some cases).

This is work that we understand, have scoped, and have prioritized. The good news is that when it’s completed, we’ll be able to support many more countries and have better representation in areas of the world like Africa, Central America, and the Middle East.

Regarding support for countries after India, Brazil and Thailand, we do have a good idea of which countries are on the list. Although this list is still subject to change, the list of countries we hope to support soon is the following (currently supported countries in italics):

In North America, Central America, and the Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Canada, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, United States.

In South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay.

In Africa: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia.

In Oceania: Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands.

In Asia and the Middle East: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Macao, Malaysia, Mongolia, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam.

In Europe and the Balkans: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

We’re sharing this information with you in the hopes of demystifying the process a bit, and we will continue to share updates as things progress. We also understand that supporting more countries in the Partner Program is only the first step towards making Medium more inclusive of the people and writing around the world.