$100 vs 100 Medium Stories: The Race Is Over…

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner! 🍾😀

Hello everyone! 👋

First of all, let me tell you something honest.

I’m really glad to be back at Medium, and I want to say a big thank you to the MWC publication. I really like your club, you were one of the first ones to accept me as a writer, and actually, this community was one of the reasons why I decided to return. 💖

In other words, Oscar Soto ⚡ and team — you are doing a great job! Keep it up! 💪

👉 Back to the story now.

Approximately ~163 days ago, before taking a pause from Medium, I posted this story on MWC:

I was kind of disappointed with my first Medium earnings, so a strange concept was born in my head. I asked myself:

Which will come first:

Will I create 100 Medium stories

— OR —

Will I earn $100 from the Medium Partner Program?

It was like a bet, like a battle between my stories and the platform.

And today, after those ~163 days, I can tell you one thing…

Houston, we have a ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶l̶e̶m̶ winner! 🥳

So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your unwavering patience and nail-biting suspense!

The winner of this strange bet is…

Money, bucks, cash, or as they say in Spain dinero en efectivo, baby! One Benjamin in my pocket! 😂💰🤑💲💸😂

So all I can do now is open champagne and put this song on:

No, really listen to it! Awesome song, in my opinion! 🎧😁 Squirrel in my wallet, baby! 🐿️

Ok, relax and breathe, Martynas! 😮‍💨 Give us some details. How did it happen?

Well strangely after I came here back, I guess I struck some sort of luck. 🍀

It happened not instantly, but after I posted a few stories, my views (and also earnings) skyrocketed. Of course, by my standards. 😅

I didn’t have any of my stories boosted yet, so probably general Medium distribution is responsible for this growth. 🚀

So to sum up:

Up until now, I have published 32 Medium stories which earned me a total of $134.64. On average it’s ~$4.21 per story.

Here is the screenshot of my Medium earnings:

But wait… Medium is not about the money…

Recently I have read and learned a lot about Medium itself. And I promise that I will transform my newly gained wisdom into my upcoming Medium stories. Subscribe now if you don’t want to miss them out! 💌

So one of the things that I wanted to point out in the conclusion is…

In the end, Medium is not about the money.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into this concept.

In one of his articles, Mr. Tony Stubblebine (who is CEO of Medium and commented on one of my stories 🤯), wrote:

So our original approach led to this algorithm that was very similar to an algorithm that YouTube or a TikTok would use. But we had readers who were telling us they read a lot, but it didn’t feel like it was truly time well spent.

So in other words, Medium is not about the money; it’s about delivering the best possible experience (“time well spent”) to your readers throughout your stories. And money comes afterward.

You can mark these words. 😂

So I leave you with this masterpiece song by Jessie J which says pretty much the same thing just about the music:

It’s not about the money, money, money We don’t need your money, money, money We just wanna make the world dance Forget about the price tag Ain’t about the, uh, cha-ching cha-ching Ain’t about the, yeah, ba-bling ba-bling Wanna make the world dance Forget about the price tag

Goodbye and see you in my next honest stories!

Martynas Ki. (@strangecash) Pure. Brutal. Honesty.