A year since the launch of the TDS Author Payment Program, we couldn’t be more thrilled with its impact. Hundreds of articles have earned a payout; to us, it’s a strong signal that the work our contributors share with readers every day remains engaging, innovative, and enlightening.
As a data-focused publication, we believe in the importance of setting ambitious goals, tracking outcomes, and iterating accordingly. In that spirit, we’ve decided to introduce changes to the program so we can better reward our most prolific authors, and offer a higher payout to more articles. This update is in effect as of March 1, 2026.
New earning tiers
We’ve been very happy with the high percentage of articles crossing the initial payout threshold (500 engaged views for $100). At the same time, we’d like to see more stories moving up to the next earning tier. To make this a reality, we’ve adjusted our earning tiers:
- 500 to 2,499 views: $100. Previously, this tier extended all the way up to 5,000 engaged views.
- 2,500 to 7,499 views: $0.05 per view. This means a minimum payout of $125, and up to $374 within this tier.
- 7,500+ views: $0.1 per view. This translates to a minimum payout of $750, and up to $7,500, the per-article earning cap.
With this new structure in place, we expect many of our authors to earn considerably more on their new articles, incentivizing them to contribute fresh ideas and perspectives on a regular basis.
A higher monthly article cap
Since the program’s launch, authors could publish as many articles as they wish, but only their four best-performing ones every month were eligible for payouts.
We’ve learned that some of our most productive and successful authors might publish quite a bit more than four articles a month, however. We think that being prolific is something to celebrate, not penalize, so we’ve decided to raise the monthly article cap to 10. In other words, authors can earn on up to 10 articles per month (and are welcome to publish more, if they wish; the payout will apply to the first 10 eligible articles).
We hope these changes encourage our existing authors to publish more articles on TDS, and inspire new contributors to send their work our way, too.
We’ll keep a close eye on the Author Payment Program’s performance in the weeks and months ahead, and may make additional tweaks if we see an opportunity to improve it. As always, we know that our publication thrives when our authors thrive, and their success is bound with ours.