How Much Medium Paid Me for 100,000 Views?

I am proud to be a 100K club member on Medium, sharing analytics and a weapon for better discoverability

One of my articles recently hit 100,000 views. This was a first that I had been looking forward to a long time.

In this article, I’ll talk about the idea behind writing that unicorn article, along with screenshots of my analytics and how much I actually made.

Before diving into the things mentioned above, here is the 100K article:

As I am writing this article, the above article is strongly running at 102,000 views.

As the name suggests, this article covers the basics of Data Preprocessing in Data Science and Machine Learning using examples written in Python.

I became motivated to write that article because I am a Master’s Data Science student. There are many people working in the technology industry eager to learn the concepts of Data Science. I believe that any aspiring Data Scientist must have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of Data Preprocessing.

This article took me about an hour and a half to bang out.

I tried my best to write it in a way that a novice could follow, including links for conceptual information written for beginners and code examples quite straightforward.

How much did 102,000 views pay me?

Roughly about $180 for 102K views.

The obvious question that arises here is why so little money for so many views.

The answer lies in the screenshot below:

As you can see, the majority of the views received are external, which proves the point the SEO on this article is excellent.

It is great to an extent when I search “Data Preprocessing in Python” in a private browser window, this article ranks 3rd on the first page of Google Search results.

This raises another question: What should I do with these external views, Medium doesn’t pay me for them?

This is where you are missing the crucial point, which became glaringly important in August 2021 when Medium announced its Referral program.

By having a great SEO on your articles, you are attracting new readers to the platform and the potential of converting them to paying members using the referral links.

I have had 5 referred members so far, which is not much, but it is still better than none.

If you are not aware of how to improve SEO for your articles on Medium, note that Medium provides you the options to change your SEO titles and description. You can do this as follows:

What are your thoughts on this?

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