How Much Does Medium Pay for Views
I examined 25 of my best performing stories to come up with pay rates
I’ve had a curious month so far in December on Medium. I tried my best to get published during the last few weeks by exploring different kinds of articles and stories. This also came out of a desire to try to earn more under the new MPP system from Medium.
Luckily my attempts paid off! I’ve managed to be published 8 times in the last couple of weeks! It’s been fun to explore these new styles and I plan on continuing it.
One thing that was a bit unexpected though was the lack of earnings results from this. Of course, we can’t expect any single article to do well just because it’s published. But surely with 8 of them, I thought at least one of them would hit 500 or more reads.
Unfortunately, none of them have come close to that yet. So I got curious today and sat down to do some analysis on their performance vs my previous self-published articles that had similar amounts of views.
And I noticed a pattern in earnings by doing so.
Analysis
I went into my top stories of November and December and pinpointed their most-read days. I then recorded all of the available statistics for those days and compiled them into a neat list of 25 biggest read days.
I know it’s not the largest sample set in the world, but it served its purpose for this little experiment.
1st Look
I looked at the largest data points first, that being total views of an article on one day.
You can see from the data points that the range is quite wide and doesn’t show any consistency.
That’s likely due to internal vs external views — both are counted under total views.
With Medium also showing articles, replies, and comments all as ‘stories’, checking your phone to see ‘Total Views’ is now useless (if you’re checking to see how much you’ve made).
So, let’s go look at another ratio.
2nd Look
Since the total views are essentially useless when we’re trying to quickly evaluate how much money we earned the day before, we need to narrow it down.
The next data point down the line is internal views. We can see that the sample range here is still quite wide, from $0.01 per internal view up to $0.17.
This can be explained by the simple fact that internal views aren’t homogenous. A view is still counted if a person reads for 1 second or 1 minute.
This is affected by how the MPP pays out writers under the new system.
It’s based on the total read time of a member, divided by their total reads each month (or something along those lines, it’s not stated).
So, let’s look at that next.
3rd Look
It makes sense that reading time should be a more accurate estimate of how much writers can earn from each article, as that’s the basis for the MPP now.
At last, we see some consistency! The range of the data points here is only from $0.02 to $0.06, with the vast majority being $0.03.
I expanded the range behind the decimal points in my Excel and saw that the majority of the $0.03 figures were really $0.032.
I’d also like to point out that the single instance of $0.06 was on the last day of November. Why does that matter? Well, it might not, but it fits in with my theory in this article about payments on Medium.
We can now understand that there’s at least a rough baseline of payments per member minute reads — $0.032.
Keep in mind this should only be a rule of thumb. Many variables can affect it.
4th Look
Knowing how much we can roughly make per minute read by members is nice and all, but there’s probably an easier way to understand it. Let’s put it in terms of minutes instead.
Using the same data set, we can flip the equation and see how many minutes we need to earn $1.
The range here shows that I needed 16 to 43 minutes of member reading time to earn $1.00.
Again, the nice part about this data set is that it shows the majority of the stories needed a very tight range of minutes per $1.
Most of them are between 29 to 32 minutes to earn $1!
This isn’t set in stone, but I’m now able to use it as a rule of thumb for any of my new articles.
Using the Ratio
Without having the benefit of other people’s data, I cannot say how true this is for the grander scheme of things. It does seem that there is a tight range for most stories though, so at least it can serve as a rule of thumb.
I now know that I can use $0.032 per member reading minute as a rule of thumb. This helps put it into perspective for future stories and earnings goals.
The below chart shows roughly how many minutes I would need to earn the different dollar amounts in a given month.
You can see that to earn money like the top earners on Medium, you have to have a huge amount of reading time — 5,208 hours to reach $10,000 alone!
Although I can use this as a personal rule of thumb, it might not work for everyone reading this. Feel free to check yourself! Just look at one of your popular stories, find its biggest day, and divide the internal views by the money earned that day.
I suspect that the $0.032 might be a common number that pops up for people, but it’s only my best guess.
Non-super accurate ratios
Since the main charts show only total views (ignoring reads + claps this time), I can still look at the chart and have a rough figure.
That is if I haven’t made any comments in several weeks! Stating again that Medium counting articles and comments together under stories renders these charts useless.
But we can still look at an individual article on the stats page. When I do this, and with the ratios I’ve derived from the data set, I can have a rough idea of what that article will make that day.
From my data, I can gather that I need 17 total views to earn $1.00. Earnings tiers would look like this if it was 100% accurate (which it isn’t!):
That’s a lot of views! Before this data collection, I had assumed that a writer would need around 300,000 views to get to the $10,000 mark. This shows that you’d probably need 125,000 to 250,000 to get there yourself, as an estimate.
The other version of this is of course ‘internal views’, which is slightly more accurate than ‘total views’, but still not great. Its view would look like this:
A lower amount for sure, but probably closer to being accurate. If you wanted to get to the coveted $10,000 mark, you’d likely need 80,000 to 140,000 internal views to get there.
I hope this can give people a rough idea of what kind of views are needed to get to different tiers of earnings on Medium.
J.J. Pryor’s Takeaway
The above stats are only meant to give a rule of thumb for different earnings levels based on reads and time. Check for yourself and see if you find similar ratios! Let me know in the comments if you do so!
Some last things to consider for Medium earnings under the MPP:
- If you write to the same audience repeatedly, then your earnings ratio will likely be consistent (is it also $0.032 per 1 minute read?)
- Watch out for your ‘responses’, it’s great to interact with the community here, but as of now, it makes the Total Views section useless for story earnings
- There are also other additional earnings, but quite small in percentage-wise from what I’ve seen
Right now I believe there are 2 additional earnings. The first is when a non-member views your article and signs up within 30 days, you’ll get a 0-view payment for that (you can see on the stats page).
The second isn’t confirmed, but in my opinion, it has to exist due to the difference between showing daily earnings and the source of those funds being from monthly payments. These payments would also show up as 0-view earnings on the stats page. I explain it below.
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