Medium Off Topic Badge Explained & What It Means for Publication Submissions
What really happens when Medium marks a story as off topic in publications?
Recently, Medium rolled out an Off-Topic badge to help publication editors identify submissions that don’t align with their publication’s selected topics.
According to Medium’s staff announcement:
Each publication can select up to five topics that define its content.
If a writer submits a story tagged with topics that don’t overlap with those publication topics, Medium may mark it with an Off-Topic badge in the editor’s inbox.
A story with no topics/tags may also receive a badge.
Writers can view a publication’s topics on its About page before submitting.
Examples
Publication topics: AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, Python, Startups
✅ On-topic
“How I Built an AI Agent with Python”
“Machine Learning Career Roadmap”
“Startup Lessons from OpenAI”
❌ Off-topic
“My Favorite Mediterranean Recipes”
“Travel Guide to Thailand”
“Premier League Predictions”
Following this announcement, I noticed that in the submission queue, almost every other draft is either flagged as off-topic or has no topics.
Also, editors seem squeamish about taking on an off-topic post, perhaps because they feel they won’t earn much compared to on-topic posts.
There have been unverified rumors that off-topic submissions may be distributed to only those in your network. Or auto-deprioritized. Again, these are what Mediumites are saying and not necessarily what is actually happening.
In the comments, I noticed people think having only five tags per publication is too restrictive.
Many publications cover a wide range of topics, and five tags aren’t enough — especially when similar subjects are categorized under different terms, such as “AI” and “Artificial Intelligence” or “Health” and “Wellness.”
Some are curious whether any editors have received a payout from the recent editing update.
Have you?
Yet others spoke about how the 2 posts in 24 hours limit may be impacting new publications trying to build a following.
I, for one, am glad for the limit simply because some writers inundate the queue with low-quality posts. It’s just annoying to have them bombard the feed and inbox (if you subscribe to them).
A few celebrated the off-topic badge as it saves them time by rejecting those submissions whose topics don’t match the publication’s selected topics.
What are your thoughts on the off-topic badge?
🎈If you enjoyed this, come say hi on Medium, where I primarily blog. Here is my latest: Let Me Enjoy Reading Without Being Judged For My Taste!
Interesting Yana. Now I'll pay extra attention to this.
How did I not notice? 😭😭😀