Can You Make Real Money With Medium?

I don't have any numbers to qualify this with, but Medium appears to be the most popular self-publishing platform around right now. Pretty much anyone can sign up and publish anything they want, yet it seems to have more cachet than throwing up a Wordpress blog or using something like HubPages.

I see a lot of newer writers using it to get samples of their work out there without having to build their own site or formal portfolio, but people from all sorts of industries also use it for exposure and to get their name out there as a "thought leader." And why not? It has a clean look, is easy to use without any need to know HTML or web design, and allows you to do some analytics tracking without having to learn SEO stuff.

So the main use is exposure. It is possible to make money directly through Medium ... but the way in which it's handled is kind of at odds with the way most people are using it.

Are those MediumBucks worth taking a crack at? We'll get into the nuts and bolts of it with today's post.

How Do You Get Paid on Medium?

You get "paid by the clap" on Medium ... probably not the wisest choice of terms by them.

When you self-publish something on Medium, you choose whether or not to put it behind their "paywall." To get paid, it has to go behind the paywall. Anything out in the open is strictly for self-promotion; you can't earn from it.

That means the only people able to read it are Medium's paid subscribers. These fine folks pay either $5 monthly or $50 annually to get the stuff behind the paywall, along with curated recommendations and no ads.

How does their money become your money? Well, Medium has a standard social media "like" system called "claps." When a paying subscriber "claps" your paywalled piece, you get a little fragment of their subscription money.

So How Much Does Medium Pay You?

                                                    Image courtesy of Sarah Lawrence


OK, here's where it all gets complicated and opaque.

The short answer is that Medium doesn't give you a straight answer on this. They say that number of claps and "reading time" are the factors, but they don't put any specific numbers on that.

Medium is also a zero-sum game. As a subscriber claps and engages with work each month, they gradually lose the ability to contribute more money. They can continue reading and clapping as much as they like, but the more they do it the more they dilute their payments - and (presumably) eventually hit a point where their claps and reading time are no longer paying anything out.

So there's really no good way to predict what - if anything - your paywalled Medium pieces are going to make you when all is said and done.

I would guess this is all by design due to Medium's shaky history of funding sources. It was straight unprofitable for its first few years, relying on funding rounds while it built up an infrastructure and content library. Then they planned to sell ads, but that didn't work, so in 2017 they laid off a third of their staff and made a big marketing to-do about no longer displaying ads.

So at first glance, it appears the company's business model is simply keeping some amount of those monthly subscriptions for themselves ... except that doesn't seem sustainable for them by itself. So the remaining suspect - and it's one of the usual ones - is that they're selling user behavior data to data brokers in the background. It's very murky as to whether or not this is taking place and what the extent of it is.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Medium has never really demonstrated a good and stable revenue plan to the public despite being around since 2012. So the reason they dance around firm payment numbers so much is that they don't want to lock themselves into amounts that they can't later meet if their revenue dwindles.

Can We Estimate How Much You Can Earn From Medium?

Well, given all the uncertainty I just laid out in the last section, this is going to be challenging. But we can give it a go by looking at how established Medium authors are doing.

Medium sends out a partner program update every month that provides exactly this information. Rather than reinvent the wheel looking up a history of monthly averages, I'll just refer you to this nice summary. To summarize the summary, it suggests the following:

• The maximum earnings range is $5,000 to $10,000 USD, but only a small handful of people are pulling those kinds of numbers. 
• A fairly successful writer - one with a follower count in the low tens of thousands - can expect to make maybe $200-400 per month. 
• ... But most people will be lucky to see $50 to $100 per month from it. 

I have to make some assumptions about quantity here, but since we're basing this on follower engagement, it's safe to assume the same rate of publishing that any given blog or column would need to keep people coming back - bare minimum once per week, and a minimum of twice a week is really better.

Medium doesn't tell you exactly who made the biggest bucks each given month, but looking at their top publications list gives us a good idea of what kind of numbers it takes to get thousands of dollars rolling in: a follower count towards half a million people, with an add rate of over a hundred per day. Note that a bunch of publications on that list, like Hacker Noon and The Economist, existed before Medium and likely brought a bunch of their prior audience to the platform.

Could the average writer break through with a lightning-in-a-bottle story that brings in significant earnings? Sure. There is some evidence to indicate this happens at least once in a while. But you're basically gambling at odds that are not good - first that you'll pick up enough viewers to make that kind of money, and then that they'll have enough "clap juice" collectively for their approval to translate to something substantial.

A more realistic expectation seems to be $50 per month for publishing once or twice a week which is ... really not good, unless you're in "the developing world" and can't get anything better going. I would likely sell any one piece that I would write for Medium for well over $50 elsewhere, so as a writer with a decent enough writing career going Medium's numbers just don't make sense to me.

Other Considerations

The straight-up money you can make from Medium is certainly consideration #1, but there are some other things to factor in.

The first is the license you grant to Medium for publishing on the platform. How much are you giving up in terms of rights to the piece? Let's check the terms. It's a non-exclusive license with no specific transfer of rights, which means you're free to publish and sell your work elsewhere. However, past blog posts from Medium users indicate they were trying to claim copyright to all published work previously. They seem to have dropped that language from the most recent agreement, but I would be very wary given that it was there before. You'll definitely want to check on any updates to their terms and conditions.

There is also the possibility of monetizing a piece with added affiliate links. However, Medium seems to ban any sort of display advertising, like a Google Adsense banner. About the best you seem to be able to do is an in-line text referral link, which does appear to be allowed so long as you disclose that the piece contains affiliate links.

Medium also requires that you use Stripe to receive payments. While Stripe doesn't really seem different from PayPal (right down to the fee structure), lots of freelancers already use PayPal but not so many use Stripe. You might have to set up a special account just to get paid by Medium.

Is Medium Gonna Make It?

It's also worth taking a couple of minutes to speculate about the future of Medium, as the platform has to be up and running and have a healthy amount of eyeballs on it to keep making money for you.

Similar previous self-publishing ventures give you reason for concern. Associated Content / Yahoo! Voices and Squidoo are a couple of very similar models that spring immediately to mind. Both flailed through a few years of unprofitability (roughly about where Medium is right now) before finally shuttering. And then there's HubPages, which is still around but is prone to periodic Google SERP nukings for low-quality content and too many dodgy advertising practices (can you think of a time in recent memory when a HubPages page has appeared organically in the top 10 of a normal search?)

Medium still does pretty well in the SERPs, probably due to leaning on the subscription model rather than advertising. The trouble with that state of affairs is that the company's finances are forever precarious. And the subscription model is a very questionable value proposition - why pay $5 a month to pick through content generated by a bunch of randos when you can just do that for free on the internet at large? When a platform allows anyone to publish just about anything and only offers dicey pay in return, that's a recipe for attracting nothing but wanna-bes and can't-make-it-elsewheres. I'm honestly surprised Medium hasn't entered into a death spiral of this nature already.

So, Is Medium Worth It?

I can maybe see some limited scenarios where Medium is useful ... but they're almost exclusively either for beginner writers with a low cost of living and not much else going on for them, or more established publishers who can route their existing audience through the platform.

The main problem is that you can't really use it for exposure / a portfolio and also use it to make money simultaneously. The only option to do both is if your article is appropriate for some text referral links. In that case, it's basically just a WYSIWYG blogging platform for people who don't want to set up an actual blog.