How Big is Your Piece of the $2 Million Medium Pie?
And how much revenue does Medium.com earn?
Ever since I joined Medium.com, I’ve always wondered how much money they make as a company.
When I started writing and trying to earn money on the platform, I began to wonder a more important question — how much are they paying writers on Medium?
Fortunately for my curiosity, there were several ways to see glimpses of this.
The Medium team itself sends out a monthly statistics update:
They used to give more details but I can’t seem to find that information anymore. Either way, they still send out stats like the above by email once a month.
You can check out their account (Medium Writers) to see more stuff like this!
There are also many Medium sleuths who helped keep track of earnings trends.
If you haven’t heard of Casey Botticello’s monthly Medium earnings survey, you should check it out. Although its a subset of writers, it’s still interesting to see what people report every month.
But none of these sources really revealed enough of the underlying numbers — until today that is!
Medium’s CEO, Ev Williams, just shared some fun new statistics today for the first time!
What are the new statistics on Medium?
If you check out Ev Williams’s latest post, you can find some really interesting information about upcoming changes to the platform:
Here are the main points I captured from reading the article outside of the tech changes:
1. The number of webpage visits to Medium
The graph that headlines the article shows this most recent quarter having a whopping 1.25 billion hits to Medium.com!
That averages out to about 416 million hits per month. Which is great.
For a long time, people were assuming the website received about 100–300 million visits per month. So this implies the readership is growing — which is good news for any writers out there.
Platform stability is a bit of a risk when picking a platform to grow on (think of MySpace or Vine), so the more popular a website is, the safer to invest your time on.
2. Medium pays out over $2 million to writers each month
This is the first time I’ve seen an updated number on the actual amount of money going out to Medium writers each month.
Note he states this amount is going towards Medium writers, editors, and publication owners:
“ We pay out over two million dollars per month to writers, editors, and publication owners” — Ev Williams, CEO of Medium
And as a data lover with 2 degrees in business — this got me a little excited. (You’ll see why in a bit.)
3. Medium has 300,000 to 400,000 members of the Medium Partner Program
I would’ve loved to see a more specific number here, but he stated the following phrase that interested me:
“With several hundred thousand members today, we are confident in the durability and scalability of the model.” — Ev Williams, CEO of Medium.com
So why are these above numbers neat to see?
Because we can make some educated assumptions!
What is Medium’s revenue per month?
Medium is a private company, so they keep a lot of their numbers, business practices, roadmaps, etc a secret.
But I used to be a product manager for many years, and my curiosity gets the best of me sometimes.
Here are some simple averaged assumptions/estimates based on the article:
- 350,000 paying Medium Members, at $5 per month (let’s ignore the yearly cheaper fee). Why? He used the word “several” hundred thousand, and not “half a million.”
- Making an assumption that 25% of members actually actively write on the platform, that puts us at about 87,500 paying writers
- There are also non-paying Medium writers that still earn money, let’s assume its about the same size as the paying writers — another 87,500 non-paying writers
- Medium pays partner publications over a certain membership size
- If you look at this list of the largest active publications, we can assume there are about 40 publications that may be partnered
- Medium itself also has 12 publications that they own and run (I’ll assume they included this in the amount paid)
- Let’s assume not all publications partner with them and state there are about 40 publications that Medium funds every month
- The funding is likely in the range of $2,000-$50,000 depending on the size and if Medium runs it itself — let’s take an estimate of $15,000
- Medium pays “over $2 million” — let’s place that below 2.5 and split the difference at — $2.25 million
Now let’s have some ‘fun’:
- Estimated Medium payouts to editors and publications: $600,000
- Estimated Medium payouts to all 175,000 earning writers: $1,650,000
- Estimated monthly earning per earning writer: $9.43
- Estimated total revenue of Medium per month: $1,750,000
I’m sure these numbers are probably quite off, but you can see an obvious problem in the above, right?
The estimated total revenue is below what they payout to their publications and writers!
That implies it’s either coming from another revenue source or from investors.
Since Medium proudly exists without direct advertisements, their potential earning sources are limited.
- They may resell articles to other news sites, but I’m not sure.
- Perhaps their own publications are commissioned to do pieces too.
- Some sites do write-ups on up-and-coming technology as expensive advertisements too.
I have no idea if any of the above happens today, but I’m sure Medium’s business team is always on the lookout for new sources of revenue.
Look at it another way, even if we assumed they only paid out $2 million per month exactly, they would need more than 400,000 paying members to match that.
And that’s before Stripe’s fees, bank fees, and not to mention running the entire business of Medium itself.
I’m not going to make any statements about where this trend will head to, but you can bet I’ll be paying close attention as time goes on!
Until next time, happy Mediuming everyone!
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