Interestingly, I don't see a need for a sub-Boost concept.. I see this as just great distribution is not "Boost or bust" on Medium!

There are a lot of stories that don't fit with our Boost guidelines that get major traffic -- erotica, true crime, meta stories. None of these are Boostable, but all of them are examples of high traffic topics that certain readers really love.

The current statistic is that every month there are five times as many un-Boosted stories that get significant amounts of traffic on medium than there are Boosted stories... this is because getting Boosted is just one of many ways that stories find their readers on Medium.

So as I see it, that doesn't mean that we need to create a secondary class of Boosting for a story that does well organically... it means that writers need to understand that getting Boosted is not the only way to have your story gets distributed on Medium. And that's awesome! It means that our distribution algorithms are working exactly as they should. The human-curated stories of Boost are meant to compliment our existing distribution algorithms -- not replace them completely.