I wrote a piece that blew up. Here’s how much money I made on Medium’s Partner Program.
Three weeks ago, I published a little piece here on Medium.com.
Three weeks ago, I published a little piece here on Medium.com.
It was an essay about the FCC’s Net Neutrality vote, something I’d read originally at The Skewer, Chicago’s Monthly Live News Revue. I’d researched the piece pretty painstakingly, and learned a fair amount about net neutrality rules that called into question the common understanding of the issue. It wasn’t a funny piece, but I still felt good about how it connected with the people in the room. When my writing does reasonably well in performance, I cross-post it to Medium for posterity.
I spent about an hour converting the essay into a Medium-friendly format. I uploaded a symbolically-relevant photo from my own Instagram archive. I sourced all my claims. I made more paragraph breaks. I came up with a moderately pithy title and added appropriate tags. I published it and shared it on Twitter and Facebook.
Later that day, I was invited to add the essay to Medium’s Partner Program by Harris Sockel. He mentioned that the site would be curating a lot of pieces on the topic in the coming week, and that the odds were good that my essay would be featured.
I’d never used Medium’s Partner Program before. I was skeptical that it would ever make me any money, honestly. I liked that the site was giving writers the opportunity to make money for their work, but I figured that putting my essays behind a (porous) paywall would diminish the number of readers I’d get, in return for like 54 cents. I’ve sold self-published books on Amazon before. The one I offered for free blew up. The ones I charged $1.99 for got like 30 downloads, max.
But, knowing that I’d have Medium’s support in promoting this piece, I decided to take the plunge.
And it paid off. Below are the stats for the piece in question, along with another, less popular piece of mine that I later added to the Medium Partner Program as a test:
7.2k reads is pretty dang good. I’ve written essays that connected with more readers than that, but it’s nothing to sniff at. The piece was shared by a lot of friends and acquaintances on Facebook, and a lot of strangers disseminated it on Twitter.
Interaction with the piece has been decent as well. As of Dec 21, the essay has 6.5 thousand “claps” and 10 comments. Very few people came to the comments to argue with me, which is usually a mercy, though in this case I think it would have driven my earnings up.
So, how’s about those earnings? Here they are:
In week 2, the net neutrality piece was added to Medium’s Partner Program. I told a few friends on Tumblr that it was monetized, and asked them to clap for it/read it. In week 3, the piece was featured by Medium, and the Net Neutrality vote was looming. Sharing and reading of the piece spiked in the 48 hours surrounding the vote, unsurprisingly. I got my estimate of earnings for that week yesterday, Wednesday the 20th.
This amount exceeds my wildest dreams and hopes for the piece. Over $700!? I’ve read a few other posts about Medium Partner Program earnings, and a few folks made upwards of $500 a month, but I figured that required posting lots of pieces that all connected with a large audience. To have a single essay rake in this much dough is a total shock and a windfall for me.
And the piece clearly was still accessible to a large group of readers, probably because the paywall is semi-permeable. I think a lot of folks accessed my essay as one of their three free reads per month. Clearly, though, a decent number of actual Medium Members read and interacted with the piece — Medium is a bit ambiguous about their payment formula, but it’s pretty clear that the attention and affection of paying members is weighted above the interactions of non-paying-members.
On the whole, I feel really good about this experience. My essay was not covered in advertisements, and non-paying-members were still able to access the writing, so I don’t feel too slimy about making money off of it. And I’m really thankful that an informative, carefully researched piece of mine is also the most lucrative piece of creative writing I’ve ever done. I’ve done academic & professional writing for more money than this, but I’ve never had an essay or short story make more than $100. I’m thankful to get compensation for my efforts.
I will definitely be featuring posts in the Medium Partner Program again. I doubt I’ll have success on this level again anytime soon, and I do not plan to place all of my posts behind the paywall, but I will definitely be using it as a resource. The essays that require the most time and research to create are ones I’m most likely to monetize, moving forward.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 280,345+ people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
