10% Of Medium Writers Make 90% Of The Dollars That Medium Pays Out
A Sobering Power Law Analysis Of Medium Payouts
Let me preface this by saying that I had to make a lot of assumptions. Medium provides very little data on the distribution of writer pay so I had to make a lot of guesses. But I do think that this analysis is at least directionally correct.
Many things in life follow a power law distribution (which looks like the plot below). A familiar example of a power law is the 80–20 rule — that goes something like 20% of shoppers account for 80% of spending. So a power law implies an unequal distribution. That vertical part of the red line (on the left of the plot) means that most people make zero or close to zero while the horizontal part of the red line means that a few people make a ton of money.
Global wealth is distributed in this way. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the guy who bought Shiba Inu coins own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world. I don’t think it’s far fetched to hypothesize that Medium earnings are distributed the same way. A handful of top writers likely earn as much or more per month than the bottom half of writers.
Like I said above, there’s not much data to fit a distribution with. The best we can do is to make inferences from the sparse payout data that Medium used to provide in years past. Up until June 2018, Medium used to report the average monthly income earned by its writers. The last reported value was $46. So let’s assume an average income of $50.
In July of 2018, Medium switched from reporting average pay to reporting the percentage of people earning $100 or more. In July of 2018, 9.8% of writers earned $100 or more. That gives us two points with which to very roughly fit and peg our distribution.
I won’t go into the math here, but you need an extremely unequal distribution for the average payout to be $50 and yet have only 10% of writers earning twice the average ($100) or more. This implies a mean that’s much bigger than the median and some very large positive outliers (the Zulie Rane, Jared A. Brock, and Jessica Wildfires of the world).
The Findings
Without further ado, if my guesses about the distribution are true, it would mean that:
- 75% of writers make $1 or less per month (so the median writer makes less than $1!). As a group these writers earn less than 1% of all payouts.
- 82% of writers make $10 or less per month (this includes the ones who make $1 or less). As a group these writers cumulatively earn less than 1.5% of all payouts.
- 88% of writers make $50 or less per month. Meaning only 12% make more than the average. As a group these 88% of writers cumulatively earn a trifling 4% of all payouts.
- 90% of writers make $100 or less per month. As a group these writers cumulatively earn approximately 8% of all payouts.
So the bottom 90% own less than a tenth of the pie. Let’s take a look at what that would mean for the top part of the distribution:
- Approximately 3% of writers earn between $500 and $1,000 per month. These 3% of writers earn 40% of all payouts!
- A mere 1% of writers earn more than $1,000 per month. The top 1% earn almost 21% of all payouts!
I’d known that my dreams of making $3,000 plus per month from writing was not going to be easy. But until I crunched the numbers, I didn’t realize that it would be this hard — it’s quite the exclusive club. Those dang power laws…