How Much I Made While Taking a 1 Year Hiatus from Medium
Income With 0 Articles Written
I finally started writing articles again after 1 year on Medium.
- Last Article Written: 08/03/2021
- Recent Article Written: 07/28/2022
So it has been about a year since I got the itch to write on Medium again. Granted, I did repurpose 2 articles in February, but it was without much effort nor impact.
The beauty of Medium is that your contents become your assets. Therefore, the articles have the potential to make money while you are asleep.
But Medium is extremely competitive. According to this article, there are 20,000 articles published per day or 7,092,000 articles per month.
This means that your articles need to be read over the 7 million articles published for you to make any income through the partner program. It seems impossible.
I thought other writers on Medium might be interested in the same topic, so I wanted to share with you the trajectory of my earnings during my year-long hiatus.
Context
I regularly published on Medium for the first three months (May to July of 2021) on Entrepreneurship, Technology, Finance, and Business themes. Through some luck and perseverance, I was able to garner some hits with more than 10K views per article:
As a result, I earned Top Writer recognition in Business, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and joined the coveted Top 1000 Medium Writer.
Here is a breakdown of my activity during the first three months:
- Articles Published: ~30
- Followers: ~400
- Total Viewership: ~20,000
And I was definitely enjoying the ride on the platform, but there were other projects I had to take on, and I had to cut the time down on my Medium activity. The startup I joined was undergoing an IPO, and I had some individual projects that needed my resources.
So I stopped, and this is what happened.
My Views/Followers/Income During the Year-Long Hiatus
First, there was a drastic drop in my views.
You can see a drastic drop in my views from 16.5k in July to 6.3k in August. Since then, my views have dropped and moved around 2k~5k with occasional dips and highs.
Some articles would come up on Google’s first results page so that I would get external views.
But we all know that external views don’t earn income on Medium.
Likewise, there was a plateau in my follower growth.
I experienced a good growth trajectory during my first three months, but after August, the growth plateaued. In 1 year, there was a growth of 100 followers, or a monthly average of about 8 followers net gain.
And you can guess from my views and followers' trajectory that my income has not been great.
I will refrain from labeling the actual numbers, but the above graph is the exact trajectory of my earnings. After a spike in July, the income has come crashing down.
From 09/2021 to 07/2022, my income was roughly about $20~$50/mo, translating to about ~$350 over the past year.
It turned out to be much better than I thought it would be. I guess some articles were still circulating.
The best-performing ones were the articles that landed on Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and the pinned articles on my profile.
So, it turns out you can earn a semi-decent passive income on Medium. But the level correlates to the number of articles you write.
Why Did I Come Back?
This month, I have started writing on Medium again, and there is a clear reason.
I am Sri Lankan and have witnessed the worse situation a country and my relatives/friends can ever experience. Fortunately, I reside in Tokyo, so I wasn’t directly impacted by the economic catastrophe.
But when I was talking about the dire situation with my friends in Tokyo or abroad, they did not know how bad the actual situation was. For instance, there are constant electricity shortages in Sri Lanka, and you have to wait 5 days to get gasoline at the pump.
So I decided to start a newsletter called “Inflated World,” where people living in distressed countries, especially during inflation, can share their experiences with people living abroad.
The newsletter is not limited to stories from Sri Lanka. We have writers from Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, El Salvador, Ecuador, etc., as the inflationary environment impacts many developing countries.
Therefore, I decided to promote the newsletter on Medium to gain viewership and followers. I believe Medium is still the king of blogging, with 50~100 million active users.
So if you have time, please check out the newsletter here & possibly subscribe, as it is free!
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