I tried every trick in the book

But still couldn’t get into the Medium Partner Program

When I joined Medium, my prime objective was to earn money doing the one thing I loved, writing. Seeing articles from fellow (amazing) Medium authors on how much they have earned through the platform pushed me to join the bandwagon to try and build my very own community here. I learnt about the most effective ways of building 100 followers and started leaving comments in articles titled along the lines of “How to obtain 100 followers”, “Let’s earn 100 followers together” while following fellow writers, you know the deal. My excitement kept me going for 2, 3 days (hitting the threshold of 100 comments marked the end of the day for me) until I woke up one day to realize that I too am eligible to follow the Program.

But as you may have already guessed, no matter how many times I tried, Medium did not think of me as partner material. As you may have already seen in several articles before this, Stripe is the one and only platform Medium uses to pay its writers (why Medium doesn’t have PayPal in 2022 is still a mystery). And being a resident in a “third-world” country, I did not have a direct way of creating a Stripe account. However after leaning about several unorthodox ways you can technically create a Stripe account from YouTube, my hope didn’t falter.

My plan was to first choose a country that supports Stripe and eventually create a Stripe account using an address and a contact number that is registered there (since that was a problem for another day anyway).

I applied every other week but still woke up to an email which said,

Thank you for applying for the Partner Program, and for all your writing on Medium. We’ve reviewed your application, and unfortunately you do not meet the criteria for Partner Program at this time.

As a reminder, those are: blah blah

To say this frustrated me could be the understatement of the century. How do they know I’m not from Australia?

Wait a minute! Do they keep tracking my IP?

And this my friend led me down a rabbit hole aka the Medium Privacy Policy. And look what I found 🤦‍♀️

Sigh.

And the search for a workaround continues…

And that’s the tea folks! Will keep you posted if I ever come across a breakthrough :)

Let me know in the comments if this helped you in any way! And I’m always open to constructive criticism and feedback! Thank you for reading my article :) Hope you have a wonderful week!