ABOUT ME | 2022 ACCOUNT | VIEWS | READS | RECIPROCAL
How Many Fish Did I Catch in 2022?
Or else how much was I viewed, read, and what did I earn?
My title is a Greek saying about performance or success. After a whining article about my disastrous December, it is time to write a more comprehensive account of 2022, which will be a bit more cheerful.
Though I opened my Medium account in 2014 I took a 5-year hiatus during most of its monetization years, between early 2017 and Jan 2022. I returned in January 2022 with 65 followers, paid the monthly fee, surpassed the followers' threshold, and finally applied for the MPP program.
This was my first ever story, on Jan 26. It’s the first third of a short story set in Japan, that I originally wrote for a contest of the platform that shall not be named:
I was accepted into the MPP program on Feb 25. My earnings for the first four days (until Feb 28) were a posh $0.14, so I exclude February and start counting from March of 2022. So how many fish did I catch in those 10 months?
Let’s start with what I’ve published. I published 373 stories in 2022, ranging from posts with a few haiku to this 11-min read story for Redemption, currently my longest story. Barely anyone read it but I’m still proud of it. The mean read time of my stories is ~4 minutes.
There are many metrics to define ‘success’ or ‘virality’, most of which are probably subjective. I’d argue for Medium a minimum of 1000 largely internal (90+%) views or mid 5 digits -50,000 or more- of largely external (90+%) views are required.
That’s because those two pay roughly the same. Of course, if someone uses Medium as a promo platform for their book/name, and barely cares about earning from it, then external views would arguably be more valuable to them.
If we define success by member reading hours I’d argue a minimum of 20 hours are required, which would translate to ~$60 earnings from a single story. Those values correspond to ~1000 views (96% internal) of a 4-min read story with a 30% read ratio.
There are many variables involved. If the internal views percentage and/or the read ratio drops you need more views for the same earnings; or fewer views if your story is longer but the other values remain the same etc etc
I extrapolated the above from my sole ‘internally viral’ story below, which attracted 3,600+ views (96% internal) 1,100+ reads, and ~75 hours of read time. It earned $217 in total (Oct — Dec), most from its viral days in the first half of November:
So I’ve had one ‘internally viral’ story out of 373 published stories. It is also my only story with 4-digit views though some others are close to that. I’ve had no ‘externally viral’ story, in other words, either by my own ‘mid-5-digit’ metric or the looser 4-digit metric.
I have earned six Top Writer badges, though currently three are active. I lost Space, Poetry and also Short Story a few days ago. I never had all six badges at the same time. I gained Satire a while after losing Poetry:
According to the dubious data of the probably obsolete (last updated in April 2022) Medium Distribution Info plugin I’ve had 30 stories chosen for further distribution, but most of them performed atrociously.
In contrast, my top performing 10 stories -incl. my viral story and three semi-viral ones- were ostensibly not distributed. Yet I saw my viral story on top of the ‘More from Medium’ suggestions for 2+ weeks.
So I cannot place any faith in either this plugin or Medium’s curation in general, either its former visible or current secret(?) form. Would you buy the plugin’s data if you saw this?
Even when Medium’s curation was visible, when it rarely worked it largely attracted external views that earned nothing. On average my ostensibly ‘further distributed’ stories have performed far, far worse than my other stories.
Hence I consider curation a vanity badge at best and a kiss of death at worst. At least Top writer statuses are not pure vanity badges: the more you get the more visible you are in the main page.
Anyway, I blabbered enough. This is what I earned in 2022:
If I subtract January’s $23.70 I earned $706 from Medium in 2022. If I add Ko-fi tips to that I end up with ~$765 in total. The mean earnings per story are $2.05 - a bit less if I exclude Ko-fi.
To be fair I earned peanuts in the first four months. I surpassed $50 in July and $100 just in November, aided by my aforementioned viral story. So was Medium worth the trouble or not? The jury is out on this one. It will depend on how 2023 goes.
I am not giving up -not yet anyway- but I need to stop having all my eggs in the same basket. And write more short stories for contests -and submit more to literary magazines- and fewer for Medium.
One last remark about quality. By now, after almost a year of being active here, this has become crystal clear to me:
➡️Medium does not reward high quality.⬅️ It rewards hype and clickbait. That’s what social media do, and Medium is 100% social.. medium.
That will be all dear readers. I would like to thank all of you for reading my stories during 2022. I feel rather uncomfortable disclosing how much I earned during my first year on Medium but I’ll get over it. I’m a big boy.
I recommend this piece by Cheri Elkin:
And this one by Leonard Tillerman:
