How Can A Story Earn $2.52 Per 4 Views, 4 Minutes Reading
Fellow writers, is this normal?
Perhaps, I’m overreacting, and it’s the way it works in Medium. Nevertheless, I’m baffled by how one of my stories is infinitely better than any other one I’ve published.
At one point, it was getting me $5.00 ish per 100 views for almost 30 days in a row. Now the views have come down significantly, but it’s performing even better proportionally in terms of earnings.
The story is this one. I won’t hold you any longer.
It hasn’t gone viral or anything, I think. Definitely not in the order of 200K viralness. Much, much less than that. I’ve published it on Jan 12th, 2021, and it has 2.4K views in total at the time of this writing. Yeah, don’t laugh.
I’ve been thinking of what may be happening here; why this story?
It’s personal, and most importantly, it’s unique!
I love reading personal stories, and it’s so liberating writing one. You know that story from the heart. You close your eyes, and it almost writes on its own, naturally in an unconscious state of mind.
I’ve written a few like that, and it performed okay. They didn’t get many views, but I received claps, nice comments, appreciation and furthermore, it helped me get through the moment of struggle and improve as a person. No money can buy such a feeling.
However, for this one, that’s getting me the better earnings — it’s so unique as well. I mean, it probably happened before with other people, but it’s gotta be rare. How many moms out there forget their babies right after giving birth?
It’s also controversial
I don’t know if you've read it, but we chose not to tell the doctors when it happened. Which was irresponsible and immature, I admit. Other people pointed out in the comments that it could be due to something way more serious, such as a stroke. Fortunately, it wasn’t, or at least nothing bad happened ever since. Calm down; we’ll pay a visit to the GP as soon as possible.
People that don’t read much on Medium must be reading my story, right?!
It’s one explanation I have for the good earnings per reading time. As far as I understand, the earnings only come from those who pay the Medium subscription and are calculated based on how much they read — for instance, if “Bob” pays the $5.00 per month and reads only my story, all the $5.00 goes to me as earnings. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
That is all I wanted to share with you, all. I’d wish I could replicate the effects to other stories. I’ll keep trying. At least the story in question gave me a hint of what is the recipe.