Tools — Chrome Extension
Earnings At Your Fingertips
This new release makes it happen
While this new release won’t magically help you earn more with writing, it does help you show you which of your stories are bringing in some money, all while checking out your stats.
That’s right. No need to check out the MPP-page or the extension’s earnings-page. Your stats now tell you everything you need to know to grow your audience.
Sowing the Seeds — Release 1.6
This release is the results of me messing around with a little idea I had. I check my stats every now and then and I check my earnings at times. But why limit myself to only one thing I’m interested in?
Those of you who have been using the extension, know that the earnings-page already provided both views as well as earnings, amongst other things. So, this might not look a big deal.
However… I don’t know about you, but I like the stats-page provided by the platform. So, I tinkered around with it until I got this result:
What started out as a few seeds I put into the ground as an experiment, soon grew to a resplendent little garden.
Pretty spiffy, right? A lot of data right at your fingertips! Maybe it’s a bit overwhelming, so let’s talk you through it.
Oh, and as Sowing the Seeds is a mouthful, I’ll name this the ‘Garden’-release.
Latest / This Month / Total
Before I go through all the columns, let’s talk about what we see above. I should probably explain some things.
Flowers do much better if you provide the right soil.
This month / Lifetime
Blue and black are just what you think they are. They are the column’s numbers for the current month and the story’s lifetime respectively. Nothing to see here, move along.
Today / Latest
Here is where it gets tricky. Notice that my green text in the screenshot says ‘Today/Latest’ and not just ‘Today’? Care to guess why?
That’s right! The earnings for a story are lagging behind. When someone views your story, you get to see that right away in your stats-page. However, due to the nature of the mechanism to determine how much you make from your readers, the earnings lags behind for a bit.
That’s why you also get this:
Use this column to figure out when your earnings were calculated. The rest of the columns show today’s stats.
All the Columns
It took me a while to figure out which icons to use for which column; I do hope they are self-explanatory:
Views and earnings
You already met the views-column. I’m sure you understand what the Earnings-column is for.
Shall we move along?
Read time
Can you recall what the stats page looks like? It features Views, Reads, Read Ratio and Fans. I decided to get rid of one of those: reads has always puzzled me. There is no way of knowing when a view constitutes a read. To make matters even more opaque, the detailed stats on a story omit the number of reads all together. At that page Read Time is favoured.
I decided to ditch Reads in favour of Read Time. That makes more sense to me. On individual stories you can still hover over a story to see the number of total reads, but I am not really sure why you would bother looking at it. It’s all about read times:
What is more telling? Knowing you got 3 reads, or that your 10 viewers spent exactly 59 seconds ‘reading’ your story?
By the way, I can’t take all the credit for the new looks. You have The Secret Aspirant to thank for figuring out on how to best display the values. I do hope our little design is to your liking.
Russell Lim suggested to include only the lifetime stats; we eventually decided against it on one of our discord-chats. To us the stats are surprisingly easy to read. I’m curious to other people’s experiences trying the live stats.
Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) recently wrote a very insightful article about white text on black backgrounds (see link below). Very well timed, as I wanted to do some tests on the current setup in regards to colour blindness and such. I have selected the colours carefully, but I won’t rule out any changes to them in the future. If you want to propose a colour scheme, let me know in the comments.
A word of warning
Let’s talk about nutrients. Gardens need manure. I sure did get my hands dirty this time around. And not just me.
As always, our dear Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) helped test this release. On the very first run the extension did not display anything. We dived deeper and soon found out why: Anthony has too many stories. The server rejects all the requests being made and refuses to provide the extension with data.
So, as usual I set out to do some optimization and make sure the extension does not load any unnecessary information.
Even without the optimizations I thought it strange that the number of requests was too much for the server to handle. I dug a little deeper and found the real culprit: the Distribution Info extension is not optimized at all!
If the new columns are not shown, turn off Distribution Info. Reload and see the magic unfold.
Breaking news: new extension on its way!
While we’re on the topic of performance, let’s discuss future developments. The extensions I make generate quite some traffic between you and the server. When you use both Earnings and Distribution Info, this traffic is effectively doubled. And, if you have been very prolific or just happen to be on Medium for a long time, then the server refuses to cooperate.
I can cut down traffic by half by merging my three extensions to a single one. In this story, I asked everyone to have One Extension To Rule Them All, or to keep my extensions seperated. The result was unanimous: every single commenter voted for a single extension.
So… My next update won’t be on Earnings, nor will it be on Distribution Info. It will be new. I’m not sure yet, but I will probably update Distribution Info to be the successor. So, for those of you that have it installed, only need to remove Earnings.
It’s likely the the next release won’t include any vegetables. Just the features you already had, minus a few bugs and maybe with a few new ones.
I’ll let you know when it’s time to act. Just expect a future update telling you what you need to do.
Oh… And I’m taking suggestions for the extension’s name.
Patreon
If you made it this far into the release notes, now may be a good time to consider donating a small sum to your favourite charity (I always like to give something to Wikipedia whenever their request pops up on their pages).
If you want, you can also buy me some new flower seeds here (buymeacoffee) or here (patreon) or leave me a review on the chrome webstore.
No money to spare? Please consider reading a story or two of the wonderful people I mentioned above.
These two wonderful people have sponsored the release recently. Please read their stories:
After all, they do provide me with lots of energy to continue what I’m doing. They deserve something in return.
Minor bug fixes
There have been a few tiny bug fixes, but one is worth mentioning:
- the earnings-page now correctly shows your yearly earnings. It is no longer doubled. Sorry that I need to cut your ego in half.
Comments and Feedback
Our What’s Up-discord server is slowly gaining more members and as such BichoDoMato offered to become a beta-tester as well. Thanks, Bicho! If you want to experience the new releases first or just want to join the conversation, just click the link.
As always, if you have any feedback, praise, complaints or maybe a bug report, let me know in the comment, or drop me a line on Discord.
Download / install / update
Installing is easy. First, make sure you have either Google Chrome or the Blaze browser installed. Then head over to the store using the link below and click on ‘Add to Chrome’ (or Blaze’s equivalent).
Release history
This version was released on April 12, 2022. Check out the releases here to make sure you are reading the latest release notes.
