Ideally, Your Earnings On Medium Will Fall
If that sounds like a paradox, keep on reading…
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Controversial? Perhaps. But hear me out. While money was never the primary driver for my presence on Medium, once I finally went behind the paywall in 2021, I couldn’t not pay attention at least to some extent to earnings, how membership fees are distributed among writers, the value of hourly read times, and all the other fun stuff related to making my presence on this platform not just fun, but to some extent also financially viable.
I came to a surprising conclusion that may or may not worry you long-term. Either way, keep on reading.
It is no news to anyone that some of the details surrounding any given article’s success on Medium are shrouded in moderate levels of mystery. That being said, not everything is unpredictable, and among other things, the future in terms of earnings is actually quite easy to predict once you reach that aha moment I did just the other week.
Many, if not most writers here are driving towards the same goal: more, more, more, and more money. Any way possible. More articles. Longer articles, clickbait, breaching copyright, you name it, people have tried it. All the while, everyone seems to forget the most basic aspect of the Medium paywall — part of the money spent on memberships gets distributed between writers.
Why is this crucial to remember? Well, not every member has the same value to every writer. For brevity, let me list out a few paying reader types, which hopefully will make you go hmm…
- The casual reader. Pays for a membership, but largely forgets to use it and tends to just happen across Medium articles and is happy they don’t have to worry about passing the 5 article threshold. In reality, they might not even read 5 articles a month, and some of them might not even be behind the paywall. Their membership fee could generate as much as $1 per a single read, perhaps even more!
- The Medium obsessed. These are paying members who decided to spend as much as an hour or even two on Medium, reading articles every day. That’s a lot of articles in a month, so their membership fee could end up generating less than 1 cent per read!
- The tunnel-vision reader. This is the type of paying member who cares only about certain topics. For instance, if they like tech, everyone else can forget they’re even there. Not gonna see a single cent out of them. However, those catering to that niche, might see at least a few cents per read from their membership fee. They typically don’t spend hours reading every day. They only care about the topic, and they tend to be selective.
- The loyal poodle. This is the type of paying member who reads anything and everything an author publishes. For them, it’s more about the connection to the writer than the article, but they’re loyal, and as long as you post, they’ll keep reading. People don’t have the time to follow this closely too many people, so you can expect a cent or two from each of their reads.
- The writer-reader. Us, writers tend to fall into this category, but it’s actually more of a mish-mash of all the above, except the first. We are pretty Medium obsessed, we do care more about certain topics than others, but we do have our favourite writers too, whom we loyally stalk in comments every time they post. In terms of earnings, we’re the worst. We scroll so much other people’s articles, we barely generate any income for others.
If you didn’t go hmm, let me try to explain. Knowing who your readers are, helps you understand your potential financial future on the platform. Whether that matters to you or not, that’s an entirely different story, but if you do care about making those $ numbers bigger, you need to understand the types of readers you’re dealing with.
How does this all add up to “negative” income?
Well, not negative per se, but now that you understand how earnings are split and what types of readers you can reach, let’s remember another crucial aspect of Medium. It’s a business. A business that wants to grow. Growth for Medium is quite simple, at least from an outsider’s perspective. Perhaps they have their internal KPIs, but from our standpoint, there are two important factors that can make Medium successful and put it on a growth trajectory.
- A growing number of members. You might think that more paying members means more money for us, and while that is true to some extent, the number of articles also continues to grow, which means there is an increasingly low chance for people to stumble upon our stories. This is nothing new. YouTube works the same way. Most of the current heavy-hitters started ages ago, when YouTube had a lot less content.
- More read-time. If those more readers spend more time reading, guess what happens? Less casual readers. Or better said, the number of casual readers won’t grow directly proportional to the new members.
Considering the above, you also have to consider that some of those readers will convert to writers who will also go behind the paywall, and you got yourself yet another reader-writer who doesn’t really contribute to your earnings.
It’s not that you earn less, but you’ll find yourself working harder to increase earnings. More members won’t be directly proportionate to more income.
Yes, inevitably, your monthly average will keep creeping up, but not as vertiginously as you might hope, or as it has so far. This, however, is not a Medium problem, it’s a business model “problem”. With increased popularity, it becomes tougher to push earnings up, as your earnings per user will fall. There will, of course, be exceptions.
Talking to other writers, I seem to be an exception as well. Getting on average 400 reads a day with 4K followers, apparently isn’t commonplace. This could very well be short-lived, though. Just like on YouTube, successful content creators come and go, and success is also a very relative matter. For me, this is still part of a 3-year experiment.
I suspect that Medium has already reached the tipping point for being on course for increased popularity. It has no choice but to try to get more readers. That, however, comes at a cost to writers. Remains to be seen just how much of a cost.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
