A Medium Mystery: The Case of the Vanishing Subscribers

Larrylambert
2 min readFeb 21, 2024

Maybe they are with my vanishing revenue.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I’ve railed against the steep decline of my earnings on Medium ad nauseum. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the term, ad nauseum means making readers nauseous. But I’m taking a temporary respite from rants about lack of income to rank about my vanishing subscribers.

I got my first email subscribers to my stories in August 2021. I got eight that month. And Medium was Camelot. However, things slowed considerably after that. I generally would snag two or three subscribers a month. At the end of January 2024, my subscriber count stood at 77. Then around early February, something happened. My number of subscribers started to escalate. In looking at the details of the list of interactions to my articles, I counted seven new subscribers. That was great. But something happened that wasn’t great.

My current number of subscribers is sitting at 73.

But wait, there is more….

None of my newest five subscribers show up my list of subscribers. Why? I also counted six deleted members. That number is extraordinarily high. And still, if I added seven subscribers and lost six subscribers, I should still be up one and sit at 78.

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Larrylambert

You probably don't know my name, but have likely seen my work. I've written for numerous syndicated cartoon strips and my gags have appeared in national pubs.