How Often Does Medium Update Your Upcoming Earnings?
Stop mindlessly hitting ‘refresh’ on your Partner Program page every hour!
You’ve reached the all-important 100-follower milestone and have been accepted to the Medium Partner Program. Congratulations! Let me guess, you’re now eager to see your article earnings start to trickle in, right?
So, you manage to navigate to your earnings page and the temptation to keep clicking ‘refresh’ until you see the dough rolling in is strong (guide below if you’re not sure how to navigate to this section). But don’t spend your precious time on this unhealthy activity!
How to see your Medium earnings on desktop (profile image icon>Partner Program)
How to see your Medium earnings on the mobile app (View stats>Audience stats> Partner Program Earnings)
How often are my Medium earnings actually updated?
You’re probably hoping that this page is dynamic and therefore shows your earnings in real time, the moment a Member reads a metered article or signs up with your referral link. This isn’t the case, and according to Medium itself, your earnings will be updated as according to the following.
- Earnings are updated every day according to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time): earnings from activity made between midnight UTC on one single day to 11:59 PM UTC on the same day will be accounted for and updated within a few hours.
- Some earnings will take longer to appear: In cases where a free user reads your story and then signs up to Medium membership within 30 days, you will earn for this reading time long after the person originally read the piece. Because this calculation is lagging, the time will not retroactively appear on your graph once they become members. But you will, of course, still earn from that time.
- There isn’t a definitive daily time when your story stats page will update: Medium aims to do this within 6–12 hours of the close of the day. This typically means you’ll see your page updated between 11:00pm PST and 5:00am PST.
- Your earnings may not line up with your story stats page or notifications: Because of earnings being based on UTC days, this may differ from your local timezone. So you may receive notifications that appear to be from the same day but are treated as separate days when it comes to calculating earnings. See a sudden change in your stats? Head over to Medium’s help article “Why do I see a sudden change in my stats?”.
And what does it look like when those earnings start to be disaplayed? Well, just like this whopping 😉 $0.08 earned from one of my stories in its first 24 hours:
Now you know! So you can spend more time focussing and enjoying your writing, as well as the work of others, instead of obsessively checking those numbers day-in and day-out.
If you’d like to support my writing and thousands of others, you can join Medium as a member using my referral link. Every member who signs up using my link will allow me to receive a small portion of your membership fee. Thank you!