How Much Medium Paid Me for 1,000,000 Views

After one year and 100 articles, I hit a big milestone

I’ve been developing websites for over 20 years (since the age of 9) and blogging since the age of 11. I started with a LiveJournal blog, where I liked to share memes before there were memes.

And, as an adolescent boy who was making internet friends on the Something Awful Forums, I liked to troll people painting with their moonblood and leave comments in pro-anorexia communities that they were endangering lives. Good times — at least for an awkward kid who really liked DDR.

I’ve obviously grown up since then.

In the last year, I’ve made a major career change, pivoting from massage and physical therapy to professional blogging. GEN recently featured my story:

I guess things come full circle. I’m back to doing the same stuff I did for fun in high school, except now I’m getting paid for it.

(At age 13, I made $300 from developing a PHP app for Livejournal users by including way too many pop-up ads, but we’ve already established that I hadn’t really developed a moral compass back then.)

I joined Medium because I knew that blogs get 0 traffic without an audience, and I wanted to launch my career in software development. At the time, having just returned from a long-distance relationship with my then-wife, and I thought I’d be able to switch careers fast enough to keep us together. It didn’t quite work out that way, but I’m better for it.

I’ve now received over 1,000,000 views on Medium, and the experience has been nothing but positive.

Career changes can take a while, but I don’t lack confidence, even after getting fired from a couple of healthcare jobs… after all, I had 20 years of experience creating websites and apps, just none in the last few years.

Unfortunately, hiring managers didn’t see things that way. I was left without many options, other than to keep blogging and networking. Every local software engineer I talked to told me straight-up that my blog was not a portfolio and that it would not get me a full-time job.

They were wrong — my Medium blog has not only helped pay my bills, but it got me freelance web developer and technical writing work via LinkedIn.

What the engineers I met meant to tell me is that my blogging was never going to get me a job from them, because my career path didn’t look exactly like their career path. And I’m fine with that.

I’ve now received over 1,000,000 views on Medium, and the experience has been nothing but positive. This is a fantastic platform, and I feel like I am giving back to the developer community with every technical article I write.

While I feel like every Medium article talks about writing on Medium, it’s hard to quantify what exactly you can expect to make when you hit 1,000,000 views. I hit that mark with 100 articles in one year — consisting mostly technical articles about JavaScript programming, though occasionally I change it up:

I totally get it. I never thought anyone could make money from writing, not even writers, because that’s what I was always told. Sure, you can “monetize” a blog somehow, but the money is on YouTube, right?

Actually, no — YouTube videos with 1,000,000 views earn $2,000-$5,000 from advertising revenues. As an ad-free platform, the Medium Partner Program instead uses a paywall model, where members who pay $5/month see their monthly fee redistributed to the authors they read based on the time they actually spend reading articles on the site (or in the app).

In Medium lingo, that’s called “engagement.”

There’s no advertising at all on Medium, and I’ve earned more than I would have for 1,000,000 views on YouTube. Check it out:

The screenshot on the left is using the excellent Medium Enhanced Stats extension for Google Chrome by Tomas Trajan, and the screenshot on the right is my actual earnings through the Medium Partner Program.

Doing the math, I’ve earned $6,260.26 from 1,000,000 views on Medium. That works out to $6 CPM (cost per mille), an advertising term meaning the cost per one thousand views.

Advertisers typically pay $2.80 CPM, so Medium is paying better than advertising — with zero advertisements. Score!

How Does That Compare to YouTube?

As Shelby Church explains in her OneZero article about her YouTube earnings, YouTube takes a 45% fee off the top of advertising revenue, meaning she takes home about $4–11 CPM before fees —which works out to an income of $2,000-$5,000 per million views on a YouTube video.

In comparison, Medium takes…nothing. My earnings are all mine.

(I’m sure they take an undisclosed profit margin from members, which I assume is 20%, just because that number makes sense to me. I have no idea, as everything about Medium is pretty hush-hush. 🤫)

Looking at the Data

Talking about $6 CPM or $6,000 per million views on Medium should be viewed cautiously because Medium doesn’t pay for views — it pays for the time that members spend reading your articles. If a non-member reads my article as part of their three free monthly articles, I earn nada, nothing.

In reality, a ton of my views (98% on some articles) are from Google searches, not Medium members, and I’m not making anything from their views or reading time at all. That means that I would potentially earn a lot more if I wrote articles that did better on Medium but worse on Google.

Let’s dig into the numbers.

My best-performing article on Medium has earned $1,092.71 for 42K views:

Looking deeper at those statistics, that’s actually a CPM of $26 — and only 21K (50%) of those views were internal (from Medium). That article has had an average reading time of 2 minutes and 22 seconds, with a total member reading time of 370 hours 34 minutes. That translates to a CPM of $52 for internal views, or a cost per minute of member reading time of almost exactly $0.05. Pretty cool!

And even those statistics are a little biased, because Medium changed from paying authors based on claps to its current model late last year. That particular article earns a lot less now than it did under the previous model.

Let’s look at the numbers on a more recent article, which has earned $15.14:

This article has 659 internal views (40%) and 1600 views total, earning $15.14 with an average reading time of 58 seconds. The total member reading time on that article has been 8 hr 44 min. Doing the math, that equals a CPM of $9 for all views, or a CPM $23 if we just count the internal (Medium) views. It’s earned about $0.03 per minute of member reading time.

What’s the Take-Home Message?

You can definitely make money on Medium — if your articles get enough traction. From writing 100 articles, I’ve earned over $6,000 in royalties. And I took extended breaks from writing several times in order to pursue other work, including being an extra on a TV show and freelancing.

In fairness, my last 3-month technical writing contract earned me $8,000 — more than my entire Medium earnings to date. But Medium is continuing to earn money for me. If I stopped publishing today, I’d still get about $200–$300 per month for a while, at least until my articles faded away into obscurity.

Like anything on the internet, some people make a lot more, and most people make a lot less. My experience has probably put me in the top 1–5% of earners on Medium in the last year, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

I had a defined niche (JavaScript programming), which definitely helped, as I’ve earned almost nothing from articles outside my niche. (It is cool to get paid $0.50 to write a poem about social justice, though. I’m a poet! ✒️)

Yours for the Taking

Here’s what the latest Medium Writers Newsletter said about what authors earned in June 2020, from the Medium Partner Program:

“63.1% of writers or publications who wrote at least one story for members earned money. 5.7% of active writers earned over $100. $33,617.89 was the most earned by a writer, and $6,386.48 was the most earned for a single story.”

Can you make bank here like Tim Denning, Thomas Oppong, Sean Kernan, Anthony Moore, Tom Kuegler, Shannon Ashley, and Shaunta Grimes — and a bunch of other great authors I’m forgetting? Sure, just write hilarious personal essays, must-read news articles, and life-changing self-help.

Then, do that every day for at least 3–5 years, and you’ll probably be making at least the American minimum wage ($15,000 per year).

It’s enough to live in Mexico! 🇲🇽

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Good luck out there! 🤩🍀🎱

Dr. Derek Austin is the author of Career Programming: How You Can Become a Successful 6-Figure Programmer in 6 Months, now available on Amazon.