How much nice cash I made for 1 year writing on Medium (in $1000s)

The Medium platform will always hold a special place in my heart.

And it’s not only because Medium reignited my love of writing after I’d started to really dislike it.

It’s because the first few cents I earned on Medium completely changed my perspective on business and making money online after a bunch of failed attempts.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has completely changed my life ever since.

Walk through a year of earnings with me. (Licensed by the author under the Unsplash+ License)

The numbers

Let’s jump right into the numbers and I’ll walk you down the path that led to me making a ludicrous amount of money over my first full year on the platform.

Month 1: A quick start

I got off to a very quick start on Medium really by chance.

When I first started out, I was kind of all over the place in terms of topics. I didn’t really know what to write about, so I wrote about everything.

I wrote about ice hockey, Brazilian election probabilities, the stock market, and various health topics.

But very quickly I realized that people were gravitating toward my work in the latter space — specifically my work describing my decision and strategies to quit drinking alcohol.

Now eventually I’d expand into more broad health topics — and those are the ones that really started earning me insane money — but it was the quit drinking sub-niche that helped me make a name for myself and build a small but loyal following.

As a result, it took me just 23 days to reach what I’d anecdotally heard was the top 6% of Medium writers — or those earning $100 per month or more.

Month 2: I almost quit

In my second month, I continued to build on those gains in terms of earnings, but I saw my first big dip in views after a couple of my stories had a nice run.

I’m ashamed to say that I strongly considered quitting at this point.

Yes, in just my second month and after already seeing some early success.

I think there’s a point in every creator’s journey when you hit your first dip and you start going, “uhg, this is stupid, why did I ever think I could succeed at this, this is a waste of time.”

I’m living proof of the good things that can happen when you push through that resistance and just keep working.

As I pointed out in another video on this channel, I decided to make one more push, and that resulted in my first fairly big hit.

The days circled in red are when I seriously considered quitting.

It also resulted in me TRIPLING my hourly income, which I captured in a video that has since become my №1 hit on YouTube.

Here are my final earnings for my second month on Medium:

Month 3: Disaster Strikes

I pushed through, got my first relatively big hit (6,000 views quickly) but then saw an even bigger dip after that one tapered off.

This one was my fault though.

I was just straight-up lazy for most of the previous month, and when my one story hit, I took my foot off the gas. I captured my feelings on that in this YouTube video:

One thing I’m really big on here and on YouTube is accountability.

The fact of the matter is, after having a really impressive output early on in my Medium journey, I allowed my momentum to slow and I paid the price.

Here’s where my earnings finished in Month 3.

Month 4: A viral story ignites

In my fourth month on Medium, things finally exploded.

On the strength of this viral article, which returned nearly $500 on its own that month and brought a bunch of new eyes to my older work.

I thought I understood what viral was before this one — I considered anything over 1,000 views to be viral, actually — but this story blew everything out of the water.

It’s impossible to predict what will become a viral story, but I did study this one A LOT and came up with some ideas of what may have caused it to take off. You can view that here:

To date, this story has earned me close to $2,000 on nearly 40,000 views.

It also showed that content is a longer game than people think.

This story did absolutely nothing for weeks — we’re talking less than 10 views per day — before igniting and changing everything for me as an online writer and businessperson.

My earnings in my fourth month on Medium.

Month 5: Slowing down

Once again, I made the mistake of taking my foot off the gas after getting a big pop from a story.

Now this one was somewhat justified.

I wasn’t just sitting around twiddling my thumbs, though I probably wrote less than I could have.

I was busy setting up my own blog site, a Substack newsletter, and really trying to boost my output on this YouTube channel — which ultimately paid off with my monetization here last month.

But I was still flying somewhat high from that viral hit.

My Medium earnings in my fifth full month.

That would soon come to an end.

Month 6: The Big Crash

I knew that prioritizing these other projets would cause my Medium output to wilt a bit.

It was a sacrifice I was willing to make — one I explained in this video:

It is important to diversify on multiple platforms — a move that wound up paying off for me when Medium updated its partner program over the summer.

I’m not sure I expected a 40% drop in earnings, but that’s what wound up happening.

My earnings on my sixth month on Medium.

When I saw that number, I knew it was time to redouble my efforts on Medium.

I’d neglected it long enough.

Month 7: The rebound begins

In Month 7, I got serious again and had my highest output since the fall. I published a bunch, including a couple stories that would turn into viral hits.

Nothing on the scale of my first one, but what they did do was RE-IGNITE my original viral story, which went on a huge run again over the following couple of months.

I did manage to get my earnings over $1,000 again, but Month 8 would change everything for me.

Month 8 would change my perception of what was possible in the online content game. (Licensed by the author under the Unsplash+ License)

Month 8: Game-changer

In my eighth month on the platform, I started having visions of writing full-time.

I had 10 stories firing on all cylinders and they were pumping my earnings to ludicrous levels.

Although I still had a ways to go to match my job salary, everything was trending in the right direction.

In fact, my earnings were arguably approaching a full-time income for some — especially because I was benefitting from an extremely generous exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars.

I broke everything down in this video if you’re interested:

Here’s what I earned in Month 8:

With the exchange rate, I earned almost $4,000 Canadian dollars in a single month.

Month 9: Momentum carries

I continued to repeat what was working and churning out hit stories. None reached epic viral proportions, but I had 5 that returned more than $150 each, with my highest earner bringing in $278.96.

This also helped sustain the heat from my viral hits and continued to bring in big money for me heading into the summer.

At this point, I honestly felt that — between Medium and my other side hustles — I could be just a year or so away from becoming a full-time online content creator.

Month 10: Lazy, hazy summer days

Despite all this success, I slowed down a lot at this point.

We had visitors in our house for weeks, and I’d rented a nice cottage for another week for my family — using my Medium earnings.

That meant lower output and lower earnings.

I actually had to recalibrate my mind a bit at this point.

At the start of cottage week, I felt like I couldn’t even really enjoy it because I felt like I should be working.

At that point, I needed to re-teach myself how to relax, because what’s the point of working for yourself if you just feel guilty not working, right?

My earnings reflected my output and things started tapering off — though not too badly … yet.

Month 11: The beginning of the end

Boy, I’d love to tell you I jumped back in, went full steam, and the gravy train kept rolling on.

But there was something hanging over my head that I worried would turn out to be a guillotine.

Many people were very, very excited at the prospect of BIG changes to the Medium Partner Program that were to be rolled out starting on Aug. 1.

While everyone seemed super psyched, everything I was hearing and reading had me really worried.

I predicted that the changes, as described, would wind up hurting long-time, high quality writers and would favor short-form creators and incentivize junky content meant to boost engagement, which was to be favored over read time in the new system.

It turned out that many of my fears would wind up being justified — issues I addressed in the video below:

My fears kept me from writing much, because I worried it would all be for naught. Would my earnings get crushed?

Maybe, but I had one more month at least of pretty high pay.

Month 12: The nightmare becomes real

It turned out that my greatest fears were realized, and the MPP changes were absolutely devastating for long-time, high quality, high-output writers like myself.

I still remember getting up early on the morning of August 2, going for a walk in the sun, and finally working up the courage to open my app.

Dread immediately washed over me.

The decision by Medium’s management to switch from paying out mostly for read time to an engagement model that paid mostly for how many comments you could generate crushed my earnings to the tune of a 70% overnight drop — a number that other big-name writers confirmed was accurate for them as well.

After earning thousands of dollars per month all through the spring and summer, this was my final payout for August 2023:

Keep in mind that this drop happened without a significant drop in views and reads from month-to-month.

So, unfortunately, it may be that I’ll never again be able to reach the heights I reached in my first year.

Moving forward

However, I do have hope just in the last week or so.

I’m not 100% sure yet, but think I’ve started to see my RPM, or revenue per thousand views, turn a little bit toward the old model.

I do need to do a little more digging, and I’m planning to conduct a little experiment over the next couple of months to see if my suspicions are accurate and Medium is starting to fix its algorithm.

There’s a specific type of story I used to write that went from earning me hundreds of dollars per post in the old system to almost nothing in the new one — even without a big drop in views.

When I’m done, I’ll report back here, so if you’re interested in finding out how that goes, please be sure to subscribe and hit that bell to be notified when I post that.

At the end of the day, however, I have no regrets.

Over the course of the year, I completely turned around my finances, experienced what it was like to build a 10-figure business after years of trying and failing to do just that.

At the end of the day, with the exchange rate the way it was, I earned a shade over $20,000 for one year of blogging — which isn’t too bad if you ask me!

Thanks so much for reading to the end! If you enjoyed this post, please give it a clap or two so others can find it!

My trending stories:

My most popular stories: