My favourite cup of coffee is a simple cup of latte.
I don’t care for the beans as long as you don’t over roast it. I don’t care for the environment of the cafe I buy my coffee from because most of the time, anxiety and being self-conscious of my surroundings kicks in and I’ll usually opt to takeaway.
In Singapore, a cup of latte can range from S$5 to S$9.
I’m not crazy enough to buy any cup of coffee more than S$5.50.
Even if you tell me the beans are the most precious beans shat from an animal, roasted over multiple days and the milk freshly squeezed from a cow that’s 30 minutes from the cafe — no, just no.
Anything more than S$5.50 is absurd money for a cup of coffee that I’m going to wash down in a matter of minutes.
So, we’ll keep S$5.50 as our target to answer our question.
If you’re here expecting me to formulate an algorithm on the best article to write, when to post, how long the article should be, etc.
Hah. You wish.
Here’s some resources instead:
And of course from Medium themselves:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036691193
The reason why I don’t want to go through that trouble is because there just isn’t the most perfect article out there that can absolutely, guarantee to garner $1k.
Because the way MPP pays out their writers is… just kind of inconsistent with too many variables to accurately tell how much you’ll earn depending on what you write — and that’s what I’ll be talking about instead.
And at this point, I’m more concerned about whether I can buy myself that sweet, sweet cup of latte — and maybe for how many times — rather than whether I can live off of the Medium pay or how to break the Medium algorithm.
Some Basic Statistics
If you don’t normally read my Medium articles, I’ve been “consistently” writing on Medium since September 2020.
I say “consistently” because whilst it’s not the most consistent in terms of a schedule or anything, at the very least I average out 1.625 articles a month since then.
Which is… kind of an achievement for someone like me who overthinks every single article and thus deletes more drafts than publish one.
I’ve written 13 articles ranging from opinion pieces to technical tutorials (which is the main bulk of what I write). Every one of them do hide behind a paywall — else how would I be able to buy myself a cup of coffee in Singapore? Psh. Note: I’m not counting the articles I unlisted.
I have 5 articles published on 3 different publications and of the 3, 2 actually reached out to me to publish my articles on their publications (holy moly, what an honor, seriously) and the other publication is my company’s publication. I do still receive publish requests from publications occasionally but I don’t often have the time to review.
If you want to know whether it’s worth it to get an article published on a publication, read on!
And okay, you can always argue that 13 articles across 8 months isn’t the best statistics I can provide (too small of a data pool) but at least I’m sort of realistic — playing the role of someone who writes on the sidelines, whenever I’m free.
If you actually want to make a living off of writing on Medium, you would have to write a ton to earn them moolah.
As of writing this post (28 May 2021), I am averaging a little over 600 views across the past 30 days, each day about 20 views across all of my posts.
My highest anything has to go to my first ever tutorial:
It has the highest views at 919, highest reads at 502 and highest read ratio at 55% but discounting number of fans.
The difference between a view and a read is the length of time a person spends on your article. A click into your article is a view and if the person spends time reading your article, it turns into a read.
The read ratio is how far the person has read through your article (start-to-finish or dropped off in the middle) and it’s usually compared against the average time they took to read the article.
Supposedly, the better your read ratio is, the more you earn — provided the people that are reading your posts are Medium subscribers. :)
Ironically, this isn’t my highest paid article.
The Inconsistencies In Payment Structure
Now, when I said the way the MPP decides how much you earn on each article is pretty inconsistent, let me break down 2 focal points MPP uses to determine how much you’ll earn.
1. How long members spend reading your story
The longer it is, the more money you (supposedly) earn. This also includes reading time from non-members if they become members within 30 days of reading your story.
2. How much of their monthly reading time members spend on your story
By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. For example, if last month a member spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your story, you will receive 10% of their share (a portion of their subscription fee).
It sounds simple enough, right? The main concept being that you’ll earn more if you get reads from Medium subscribers and that they read yours for long enough without dropping off.
And although point 1 is pretty simple to deduce from the data on their dashboard, point 2 is the one that leaves me in the dark. The dashboard just doesn’t have granular enough data for me to make any deductions. Thus making the whole payment process very obscure.
So, what do I mean by inconsistency?
My highest paid article is my 2nd highest viewed article with 590 views.
The average read time is dramatically shorter than the expected Medium read time (2 min 29 s versus 6 min estimated) — I would dare say it’s one of the shortest, where the attention span of my readers was only barely 1/3 of the length of the article.
Granted my highest viewed article is shorter in length compared to my highest paid article by a 2 minutes read, my highest paid article still earns S$1.37 more. (And to some extent, Medium does seem to penalize you for writing shorter articles though they say they don’t… ok Jan.)
The read ratio is also worse on my highest paid article and both articles were written days apart.
Of course, you can say that my highest read and highest paid are the ones I wrote close to 8 months ago — duh — the longer it’s been published, the longer it has to accumulate views, reads and thus wealth.
But the time it was written isn’t everything.
It also greatly depends on the content.
For example, my most recent article — another technical tutorial, has already garnered an amazing $0.06 that I can spend at absolutely nowhere, despite it being written a little over a week ago.
Outperforming my other commentary articles that aren’t technology related.
The only non-technology related article that did… sorta *ahem* well?
A piece where I talk about the Last of Us Part 2.
It earned S$1.84 (#4 of 13). :)
I guess to some extent you could also say that maybe I just write better technical pieces because I’m a software engineer, after all. And maybe that’s true. If I honed my writing skills to write a greater variety of articles, I might just see more non-technical articles earning more money.
So my best advice?
Write what you are confident in and keep doing it, regardless of the category.
You’ll always find that pool of readers that would love to hear what you have to say, or to learn more from you.
Do The # of Fans Affect How Much You Earn?
Sure, to some extent.
It might make it easier for Medium to share your article, or for people to find it by luck and maybe people will take what you’ve written more seriously if more people clapped — suggesting that they agree with your opinion or appreciate your tutorial.
And whilst my highest paid article has the highest number of fans across my articles, there are still articles with the same #, but barely paid (i.e. S$0.28). There are also articles with 0 fans and ranks #4 in amount paid.
So… don’t worry so much about that. As long as your content is well-written, fans will naturally come.
Does Publishing in a Publication Really Help?
It really depends.
Again, I’ve only had 5 articles published across 3 publications and sure, it’s not a lot of statistics to back it up but meh, take this section with a grain of salt.
My highest paid published-in-a-publication article is my highest viewed — which did not beat out the highest paid overall. Whereas all the others were easily half the earnings from the highest paid. But still, you could somewhat argue that the most recent 3 articles were written only 2 months ago as opposed to 7–8 months ago.
When you take a look at the number of views they bring in (right most column)… it’s not a lot? Javascript in Plain English is definitely the highest — and in fact brings in views to my other articles too! Which is a huge win-win.
And you could definitely factor it to the content I’ve written: it’s a little niche within the tech world.
Despite the publication bringing in the views for such a niche content, its earnings are kind of meh.
So my recommendations is that if given the chance to publish in a publication, sure, why not? You have nothing to lose. It doesn’t earn you a ton of money despite the publication’s viewership size but you can get your name out there and bring in new viewership!
Ok, Enough Bull: Can I Pay For A Cup Of Coffee With My Medium Earnings Or Not?!
Yes. Barely 3 cups of S$5.50 latte!
In total, I earned S$14.71 across 13 articles in 8 months. It’s honestly not a lot, and I obviously can’t and won’t be making a living off of this anytime soon unless I really ramp up the number of articles I publish.
But ya know, for over 8 months, it’s kind of… nice. I guess.
Now I just gotta wait for the lockdown 2.0 in Singapore to end in June and maybe think about buying that 2.6 cups of coffee… and that’s discounting potential taxes to pay. I think.
If you want to see a basic excel sheet of my earnings, views and whatever else, here you go:
Feel free to leave comments or give me some claps if you actually managed to finish this article in a reasonable amount of time so that I don’t get penalized by Medium!
