Boosting is good for the ego, but mostly I think it's a scam perpetrated by Tony Stubble as a larger process to slash our earnings.
I can give you a direct comparison of boosted over non-boosted.
One recent non-boosted story I had:
$420 Earnings on 11.1K Views
9.3K Reads
84% Read Ratio
https://medium.com/illumination/florida-is-dying-dd8d3a57ba75
But they changed the algorithm so that reads no longer mean much. Now, they are talking engagement, which means you need to hope people highlight your story or you hire Perlmutter to do it.
A story with similar numbers but was boosted:
$723 Earnings on 7.8K Views
5.4K Reads
69% Read Ratio
The Florida story had significantly more views and a much higher read ratio.
Why? Because it was a better story.
Nothing wrong with the Marienthal story, in my very humble opinion, but the Florida story was better. More heavily researched, more engagement. Almost 2,000 more claps (which I believe are also being demoted by the algorithm) and 20 more responses (which are not supposed to be).
So the clearly superior story made $300 less, because, I assume, it wasn't boosted.
Still...
My most recent boosted story netted me 92 bucks total.
I've written more this month for Medium than ever as a test of sorts. Waste of my time. Experiment over. My time is worth more than Medium wants to pay. I'll expand on this on a full story later, but overall, you're not missing anything, and not being boosted is NOT a reflection of your writing.
Honestly? I think the story that got boosted was boosted for its clever headline. That's no way to run a blogging app.
