It took me 164 days to become eligible for the Medium Partnership Program. Beforehand, I only made money by writing for other companies (while using Medium as a reference). So now that I have been monetized for a month, how much money did I make?

Disclaimer

This story is a part of the Loot From Medium series. I started my Medium journey on August 23rd, 2022. In the first 150 days, I received approximately 9,300 reads and 73 followers with 46 stories. I still have yet to release “content that may change everything”. More importantly, this story comes out 210 days from the day I started writing on Medium: What happened to “Loot From 180 Days On Medium”?

Going forward, I have decided that this series must align with actual payments, and this decision required me to wait until I had cash from Medium in my bank account. So this story replaces the “Loot From 180 Days on Medium” story that would have been published on February 20th, since Medium sent payouts for February (1st — 28th) to authors on March 6th.

In other words, this story covers my earnings for the month of February 2023.

I Got Monetized

Microservice Misery

I published Do I Need Microservices on January 29th. The story quickly hit the frontpage on r/programming and stayed there for 24 hours. This traction resulted in the story ranking first on the “Programming” and “Technology” topics (tags) of Medium for a few days. And after all of this distribution, I gained a whopping 6 followers (79 total).

I cannot say I was surprised. This story’s poor retention is a reminder of a facet of my Theory of Relatability: Highly skilled audiences are both hard to reach and to appease. In this case, I had reached over 10,000 people with the story, but only 3,400 people read it. Of those 3,400 people, only 15 engaged with the story directly on the Medium platform.

Could metrics involved in this analysis be misleading? Yes. Up to 90% of Reddit posts’ “views” may be from bots. Regardless, it’s clear that Reddit isn’t the best audience for engagement on Medium, as those who read the story approached it in a critical manner.

This story earned $1.70 from February 6th to February 28th.

A Shitpost Made of Gold

The failure of the “Do I Need Microservices” story made me think for a long time. However, I’d be lying if I said I had no options left: I still had new content to release but didn’t want to release it while unmonetized. Luckily, I didn’t have to, either.

On January 28th, Medium Staff placed a story about Google layoffs on the frontpage that I found absolutely absurd. So much so that I thought it was a joke… It wasn’t. Not to mention that I still needed to publish a Wagie Woe for January. So that’s how I came up with the idea to write a story about a Googler who got fired and ended up working at McDeez.

I wrote the entire story while waiting in line at Panda Express. I don’t know why the line took so long that day. Perhaps, there was a fat fucker in it or something. All I know is that I tried my hardest not to burst out laughing while typing up the outline on my phone.

When I got home, I spent an hour or two finishing up the story and published “I Used To Work at Google. Now I Flip Burgers.” Then I went to bed. For the next few days — including the day I published “Do I Need Microservices” — I forgot about the story completely. That was until I noticed my follower count shooting up rapidly.

Every time I logged in, the number got higher and higher. 80 followers. 93 followers. 100 followers. I went from 79 followers on January 29th to 100 on February 3rd. All this growth thanks to a shitpost I made about a nonsensical event that occurred in the Wagie World (when Google fired its unproductive boomers).

The failure of the “Do I Need Microservices” story made me think for a long time. However, I’d be lying if I said I had no options left: I still had new content to release but didn’t want to release it while unmonetized. Luckily, I didn’t have to, either.

On January 28th, Medium Staff placed a story about Google layoffs on the frontpage that I found absolutely absurd. So much so that I thought it was a joke… It wasn’t. Not to mention that I still needed to publish a Wagie Woe for January. So that’s how I came up with the idea to write a story about a Googler who got fired and ended up working at McDeez.

I wrote the entire story while waiting in line at Panda Express. I don’t know why the line took so long that day. Perhaps, there was a fat fucker in it or something. All I know is that I tried my hardest not to burst out laughing while typing up the outline on my phone.

When I got home, I spent an hour or two finishing up the story and published “I Used To Work at Google. Now I Flip Burgers.” Then I went to bed. For the next few days — including the day I published “Do I Need Microservices” — I forgot about the story completely. That was until I noticed my follower count shooting up rapidly.

Every time I logged in, the number got higher and higher. 80 followers. 93 followers. 100 followers. I went from 79 followers on January 29th to 100 on February 3rd. All this growth thanks to a shitpost I made about a nonsensical event that occurred in the Wagie World (when Google fired its unproductive boomers).

This story earned $721.64 from February 3rd to February 28th.

The Monetization Process

With 100 followers, I finally met the requirements for the Medium Partnership Program. The entire process took three days. During that time, I decided to analyze my story metrics before being monetized.

55 stories. 70,283 words. 12,918 minutes of total member reading time. Those were my stats when I got approved for the Medium Partnership Program on February 3rd, 2023.

— Two Stats Changed My Writing Strategy On Medium

I couldn’t meter all of my stories until February 6th, 2023, so much of the traction I had gained during the monetization process went unmonetized: It’s crazy to think about when you consider how much I still made. That said, you may be curious about how much value I provided to Medium for “free”.

Medium pays its authors based on their membership referral count and total member reading time. By the time I joined the Medium Partnership Program, I had already gained 12,918 minutes of member reading time. If each minute is valued at ~$0.03, I provided Medium $387.54 for free. In other words, I would’ve earned at least $387.54 if I was monetized with 0 followers.

That’s not exactly how it works, but it’s close enough.

There are other notable metrics in my analysis. Most important is the total member reading time of each article. In “Loot From 150 Days on Medium”, I surmised that my best-performing stories would be opinionated (“dramatic”) content, and this assumption was correct: Here were my top 3 stories by total member read time on February 6th.

1. I Placed a GPL License in my Take Home Interview Project (90 hrs, 432 words).
2. Rapper Destroys Google Software Engineer in API Development (33 hrs, 1,214 words).
3. “I Used To Work At Google. Now I Flip Burgers” (24 hrs, 1,035 words).

I published 15 statiscally insignificant stories from February 15th — February 28th.

Of course, on March 1st, these values were much different. For one, “I Used To Work At Google. Now I Flip Burgers” had 264 hours of member reading time, while “I Placed a GPL License in my Take Home Interview Project” only had 94 hours. Yet most important of all metrics is the discrepancy between engagement on informative content vs. dramatic content.

I may be repeating myself, but it’s mind-boggling how “dramatic” content outperforms “informative content” on this platform. In hindsight, the phenomenon is not that surprising. What makes it so interesting — for me — is that I was raised by people who take themselves incredibly seriously. My profession is filled with elitists, many of whom can’t take a joke. Not to mention the “current direction” of Medium, which is to be taken more seriously in a “professional” capacity.

Yet all people want to do is watch the circus.

Top Writer Status

I achieved top writer status for the technology tag (topic).

Striving For Improvement

There are many reasons to improve your writing that go beyond financial gain. Medium offers analytical tools that help you develop your writing skills. However, these tools are lacking when it’s time to achieve mastery. As a result, I created several analysis tools to assist me with writing and content management.

The Medium Algorithm

I researched How Medium Works (series) to investigate the CEO’s comment about incoming changes to the Medium algorithm. This series highlighted where to place my efforts while writing and distributing stories. It also highlighted a few basic mistakes I was making, such as not adding subtitles to my stories for frontpage eligibility.

My “Staff Picks List Analysis” is a notable story in this series. To collect the data for that list, I created a scraper that uses a single page load to work: Analysis of the collected data shows what frontpage stories Medium deems “high-quality” and provides further insight into what stories they promote on the platform.

It’s wagie sh*t!

Stat Aggregation

Medium does not show aggregate statistics such as total views, reads, or read time. To collect these metrics, you must manually calculate them. This behavior makes finding the total views, reads, and stories for this series tedious. So I created an automated manner of calculating these by scraping a saved web page (/stats).

Sourcebase

The scope of — what I call — Sourcebase provides more functionality than Medium tooling. That said, I have used Sourcebase to manage the state of my stories. For example, I can track the publish status of a story, its publications, canonical URL, archive URL, and more. Thanks to Sourcebase, I can say I published 29 stories among 7 publications before being monetized on Medium.

What’s Missing

A few tools still need to be added to my story analysis suite, and these will be discussed in a future story.

What I Learned

Without further action, all of this analysis would be useless. Of course, I spent time incorporating what I learned into my profile and publishing strategy. This work included the creation of a Story Guide on my profile, which provides context to understand my stories better.

What else did I learn? Imported stories aren’t distributed, so I removed them (for potential republishing). Meta posts — such as this one — aren’t distributed (but that’s fine with me). The satirical “Maybe Bezos Is Right” series was irrelevant to the platform’s left-leaning audience, so I removed it. Medium loves the Wagie Woes series. So on and so forth…

I also discovered that distribution via a publication isn’t as powerful as distribution via tags or external promotion for a story’s algorithmic score. This discovery is significant because using a non-self-owned publication has considerable associated costs. For example, when I published “Do I Need Microservices”, there was a brief moment when the title was edited by a publication editor to “Do Need Microservices”: A few people caught this error, and one tweet carried it by reposting the story.

The other issue with publications is that — as a writer — you must wait for your story to be approved. This process takes time, and not every story has the luxury of being timeless. Remember when “Uber Was Hacked”? A large part of that story’s success is that I was the first on the platform to cover it: The story was self-published first, but many publications forbid authors from doing so.

Medium has announced a Boosts feature that’s supposed to make curators (publishers) more powerful in an effort to improve the “writing quality” of the platform. I think this is because a bunch of HackerNews nerds started sh*tting on Medium. Then, the CEO of Medium read their comments and decided that these people — who hate the platform’s “membership wall” (read: paying for content) — must be catered to.

So maybe I need to revisit my publication strategy…

Loot From 210 Days on Medium

The Aggregate

What did I gain from posting 72 articles and 19 responses on Medium in 190 days (from August 23, 2022 — March 1, 2023)?

• 52,114 views (18,584 reads).
• 193 out of 100 followers (required for a Medium Partnership).
• $803.57 earned (from the Medium Partnership Program).

Going forward, I have invested in writing tools and am undergoing an overhaul on SwitchUpCB. I also plan to edit every story I have ever published. That’s 100 stories. All while I record new music. Thus, my output will not be 100% until I complete these tasks. But most importantly, after 190 days, I have made money on Medium.

Is Medium Worth It?

Now that I have made money on Medium, a single question remains: Is it sustainable? The answer will determine if it is worth it for me. Let’s say I need to earn $40K annually to live in the US before taxes. I can write up to two “quality” 7-minute stories per day. So each story must earn $60 for Medium to be sustainable. If I only created one story each business day, each story would need to earn $153.

Of course, this calculation assumes that no other financial options are available to me.

Upcoming Series

In Loot From 120 Days on Medium, I stated, “Nothing is more relatable in a first-world country than the job-interview process”. Well, I was wrong. The actual most relatable topic is dating. So when I refer to “content that might change everything”, now you know…

There is one problem, though. You see, I originally planned to make it an informative series. However, in hindsight, being informative is not the best for engagement. This phenomenon has a few other implications when it comes to sustainability.

Sustainability On Medium

After searching far and wide, I have recognized what type of content Medium wants authors to create on the platform. That is actual, real-life stories from “doers” with years of experience in a given role. However, an individual can only have so many of these stories that are also interesting to others.

So what about me? I have many stories to tell. The problem, though, is that many of my stories are not positive. When I set out to create my blog two years ago, I wanted it to be full of positive experiences in my life. So I sat down and started writing about my “crazy” experiences.

The first story I posted to a forum got removed for various trigger warnings because, as it turns out, many of those stories contain “unprofessional” or “abusive” material. Now, I am not one to call myself a victim, but I do understand that I’m not normal: As I continued to write, I understood why.

And this is a problem — to be an outlier — on a platform that rewards normality.

The truth is that many of the stories Medium would prefer me to write have already been written, possibly published on SwitchUpCB, but not publicized on this platform. I don’t feel my stories would be “appreciated” on this platform. In addition, I won’t risk various terms of service violations to tell a true story. People don’t want to read about stories of the abused, but rather those who are successful and relatable.

And who’s to say my real stories are even believable?

I have looked around. Medium places FAANG on the front page frequently. There are so many writers on the platform, yet somehow the same people are included two or three times. Some people are celebrities. Others are “prolific”. Yet the common pattern is that the topics center around the “successful”, their lifestyles, and their downfalls.

This platform is “headed” in a direction where it promotes stories from successful yet unheard “doers” who “don’t care to build an audience”. That means this platform aims to reward people who are already successful, just like the economic system it’s developed in. Yet the successful do not need Medium’s payment: So if promoting these people is the goal of the platform, why would Medium care about the sustainability of its writers?

Let’s see what happens.