Medium Earnings
How a New Writer Made $6,000+ With One of Her First Medium Stories
An update on my interview with Shelby Church and her Medium writing experiment
As some of you may remember, a few weeks back I was interviewed by YouTube super-star Shelby Church for a video discussing making money through online writing on Medium:
As part of her video, Shelby experimented with writing a few articles to see whether she could demonstrate to her followers the earning potential of writing on Medium.
As she explains in her video, her first few attempts were not very successful, despite posting high quality content.
One of the points I made in our discussion about succeeding on Medium was that if a writer does not have a large following, getting curated (or better yet, featured across the platform) was key to viral success.
After the video aired, Shelby kept at it, and submitted her articles to a number of top publications. Among them were The Startup and OneZero.
She was accepted to OneZero, curated in multiple categories, and featured across the Medium, and her article, How Much YouTube Paid Me For My 1,000,000 Viewed Video, went viral:
Today she posted an update video for her YouTube viewers, many of whom were curious how much she had ended up earning on Medium (myself, included).
I knew her article had done well. I had been sent the article from Medium directly and saw it trending as a top article across the platform.
But I was still shocked to see the results of her writing experiment and how fantastically well her article had done (keep in mind, this was still one of her first few articles on Medium):
She had made over $6,000 from her Medium article!
And the article is still earning more money every hour!
While Medium has yet to release its updated monthly earnings stats for April (or May) I would not be surprised if this ended up being the single highest earning article on the platform, based on previous months (click on the second tab in the chart below to see the highest earning articles by month):
I started getting a bunch of emails today because some of my Medium readers had started following her YouTube Channel, and saw this video before I did.
While I knew that with the proper exposure, her content would kill, this was truly an exceptional result, and in my opinion, one of the most fascinating earnings case studies I have ever seen!
It’s really the combination of several incredibly unlikely events occurring at once:
- For someone to go viral in the first few weeks of writing on Medium, they typically need a massive following elsewhere. Shelby had that. Her YouTube channel has over 1.5 million subscribers, and her videos collectively have over 116,808,566 views.
- The article has to have mass appeal. Earnings related articles always do well. And so do articles covering tech platforms (like YouTube). But her video contained the answers to questions that literally only a handful of people in the world could have answered — how much money will 1,000,000 views on a single video on YouTube generate. Similarly, this video was one of her most successful YouTube videos, despite the wide range of high quality content she had been filming for years on her channel.
- This was far from an “over night success story.” Shelby has been producing, editing, writing, and starring in her own YouTube videos for years. Suggesting that she was simply lucky (as I noticed some comments were suggesting) is absolutely ridiculous. She worked hard, made an amazing product, and built a loyal following. Documenting the financial pinnacle of her YouTube videos (by writing an explanatory Medium article), was an article 10 years in the making, even if the article in question only took her an hour or so to write.
So yes — while these results are anything but typical or even realistic for most writers, Shelby’s incredible work ethic underscores a theme that is common among many top articles on Medium. Top articles on Medium distill an extraordinarily complex process or story (reaching a million views on YouTube) into a succinct article, supported by a fan base built over time, written by a friendly/relatable personality.
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Casey Botticello is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blogging Guide, an online community of writers with an award-winning newsletter. He is also the creator of the popular Medium Writing Course and the Substack Newsletter Course.
Casey previously worked at several tech startups, a lobbying & strategic communications firm, and has created several businesses of his own. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, follow his Medium publications, Digital Marketing Lab and Medium Blogging Guide, or reach out to him directly on his personal website.
