$5 for 1k Views — and I’m Thrilled

Taking the long view of external readers

I’ve been on vacation this month and not writing much. So I was surprised when my daily views jumped from around 100 to around 300. And then stayed there. What was happening?

I quickly discovered that one of my stories had taken off with readers outside of Medium. 80% of the views were from outside readers. Then 85%. Then 90%.

I hit 1000 views and over 600 reads for the 7-minute story. And earned only $5.

A lot of writers would be distressed at this. I was thrilled. Here’s why, and why you should be excited if this happens to you.

The truth is in the chart

First, let’s take a look at the statistics for that story.

The original story was published over the weekend, and got the most views from people getting their Sunday fix of cute cat stories. There was another slight rise midweek — people need cute cat stories to keep them going at the end of the work week. By the next Sunday, the story was replaced by the next cute cat story.

But it exploded outside of Medium that Sunday. And because of the popularity, it got a “second wind”. It made another dollar from Medium readers who saw it because the algorithm thought it was hot.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the story only earned $5. That means 20% of its earnings came from the external reader popularity boost.

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The second big benefit came from the referral of my other stories at the end of the article. Here’s the chart for my other well-performing cat story. As you can see from the graph, this story was popular in July, but had faded in August.

There was a brief pick up when the new story was first published.

Then, on August 15, the other story started getting hundreds of external visitors. My “similar” story started getting referrals. The overall number of views wasn’t great — but these were people who’d already read one of my stories. They read this one. They read the many, many comments to this one.

That’s a lovely little spike in earnings from a story that had pretty much finished its run. Here’s a close-up of the August earnings, so you can see what I mean.

That means about 1/3 of the total revenue from that older story came because of the new story’s popularity.

But wait, there’s more

These gains are the immediate gains from more Medium members seeing the story, and seeing my older story. But I anticipate a big bonus to come.

You see, the story has a 61% read rate. That means about 650 people read the whole 7-minute story. If any of them decide they need a steady supply of cute cat stories, and become Medium members, I’ll get a bonus.

Their retroactive reading activity will be credited to me, as will a fractional portion of their membership fee. Given the new dedicated membership rewards, that fractional portion will be pretty small if someone else gets them to sign up under their id. But if they don’t specify who caused them to sign up, the reward should be distributed as it was previously.

Here’s what happened the last time a story of mine had significant external views.

As you can see, from mid-July onward, there were very few Medium members reading the story. But the external readers who’d read it were converting to Medium membership. All those spikes in earnings after July 18 are primarily conversion bonuses.

That’s enough to give you an idea, but a similar thing happened in August, too.

This story, with about 1k external views, ended up earning over $100. For a story people spent, on average, 3 minutes reading.

My new story has around 900 external views, so far. And readers spend, on average, 7 minutes reading.

It’s possible that Medium’s new member-sponsorship program will drastically affect the amount we’re paid if we’re not the sponsor. But if not, I expect this to be another extremely profitable story.

Conclusion

Many authors would be upset to earn only $5 for a 7-minute story with a 61% read rate and over 1,000 views. It’s because 90% of the viewers are external. The short-term thinking view is that those views “don’t count”.

There are three long-term reasons to be happy:

• External popularity raised visibility of the story, generating 20% of its overall earnings among Medium readers.
• The story’s popularity caused my similar story to also gain in popularity, generating nearly 1/3 of its total earnings.
• Another story with about the same number of external views earned over $100, much of that in conversion bonuses for external viewers who became Medium members.

So even if I don’t make very much money from the 10% of viewers who are current Medium members, I anticipate that the story will eventually produce much more than that.

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