Thanks to Brave and Medium bringing back custom domains, BAT tipping is open.

As any long time reader knows, I’m rather critical of the monetization system on Medium. It wasn’t bad back in 2019, but things have gotten progressively worse. Medium pushed aside authors who write short form articles, especially short poems. While doing so, they promoted their own publications at the expense of the regular author. If Medium at least had an internal way of tipping, it wouldn’t be terrible, though it’s still problematic.

Luckily, there’s no a workaround. Medium recently brought back custom domains for authors. Because the Brave tipping system works based on domain names, the author can create a custom channel in the Brave Creator system for whatever domain name the author chooses and has control over. For instance, my custom domain name that connects to Medium is blog.danielgoldman.us and because it’s attached to my root domain that’s listed on Medium, I’m good to go with receiving tips.

Of course, a reader still needs to be using Brave and have BAT in their Brave wallet. Luckily, anyone who uses Brave quickly accumulates BAT from viewing ads. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone who uses Chrome wouldn’t switch to Brave, but a lot of people don’t. Maybe being able to tip underrated and underpaid authors on Medium will give them one more reason to switch over.

For Authors

1. Create a Brave Creators account.
2. Assign a custom domain name for your Medium account.
3. Create a channel for that domain name under your creator account.
4. Let your audience know that they can tip you!

You’ll need to link your creator account to Gemini or Uphold to access your payments. This article isn’t meant to fully explain BAT and Brave.

For Readers

1. Download and install Brave.
2. Start collecting BAT, either by receiving ads through Brave or buying BAT on an exchange.
3. Find a Medium author who uses the Brave creator program.
4. Click on the small triangle to the right of the URL bar. It’ll bring up the tipping window and it’ll tell you if the creator has verified their URL. Make sure you’re on a verified URL and not Medium itself or you’ll end up trying to tip Medium.

The above shows what tipping me would look like. As you can see, there’s a checkmark indicating that the URL has been verified. The minimum amount to tip is 1 BAT which is about $1.40 as of writing this article.

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