4.4K Views But Made Only $3.33 — What Happened?
Three months ago, one of my articles went viral with 9K views — it earned a whopping $120.05.
Imagine my excitement waking up this morning and see a big spike on my Medium stats. Only to find out that it barely made a profit. My excitement immediately plummeted and I went to find out what happened.
Let’s breakdown the ratio: 240 Internal Views, 4.1K External Views
The result: $3.33
Now let’s compare that to one of my other articles “A.I. Turns Your Rudimentary Doodle Into A Jaw-dropping Painting” that got 2.4K Views.
Here’s the ratio: 1.8K Interval Views, 598 External Views
The result: $51.96
It was that moment I realized that the external views are worth NOTHING in terms of earnings. But that’s not entirely true, I’ll explain later.
Internal Views VS External Views
Internal traffic refers to the views from Medium article distribution. This can include articles featured on the homepage, views and reads through Medium mobile application, and emails sent to paying subscribers.
External traffic on the other hand, refers to all traffic your article gets outside of Medium’s distribution channels. This includes clicks coming from Google search, writer’s social media shares, or direct link in a writer’s newsletter.
As you can see in the stats of the story that I am talking about in this article, only 6% of the traffic is internal. 94% of the article’s traffic is external.
Most of the traffic comes from search engine. It also got a decent amount of views from Android device and email distribution.
Earning Calculations are Lagging
If you head over to Medium’s Partner Program Help Center you’ll see that you can still earn from non-paying readers but it doesn’t happen right away.
You may earn on days where you don’t receive as much member reading time, because some pieces of your earnings calculation are lagging.
This gives me a lot of hope that the article could still reap some profits in the future.
For example, if a free user reads your story and then, weeks later, subscribes to Medium membership, you will earn for their reading time long after their read occurred. Earlier reading time will not retroactively appear on your graph, even once they become members, but you will earn from that reading time.
The lesson here is to not discount those External views. People read, and they follow.
Final Thoughts
As I said earlier, external views, even though they don’t immediately translate to profit, are not at all bad. The fact that people spend a few seconds of their time to click on your story means that it provides interesting and pertinent information.
Even though your story may not always resonate with Medium’s paying readers, it just might resonate with readers outside of Medium. If you get lucky, these readers may eventually become premium members down the road.
P.S.: If you like to experience Medium, consider supporting me and thousands of other writers by signing up for a membership. Or you can buy me coffee here instead. Have a nice day :)
