I am not going to play this game with referrals. I run a fairly successful blog that has absolutely nothing to do with my writing on Medium where I see about 50k unique visitors a month to my website. I have referral links all over my website and it hardly generates any money. They only thing about it is that they are easy and the few dollars they do generate are 100% hands off. If I tried to map this to Medium, it would be a dismal failure. Honestly, I expected much more out of Medium this August. They seem to want to funnel all the money to the top writers instead of giving us all a better chance at the pie. The bonus structure was a big success in my mind. I got it three months in a row at the $100 level and it really made me want to write more. Now I could care less since there is no incentives anymore.