I Worked For $3.56 A Day In April. Am I Crazy Or Smart?

If an employer would pay me this wage, he deserves to burn in hell. Why Am I Still Working For This Money?

I am the first to demand higher wages for the hard-working people in factories and offices around the world. Capitalist exploitation is an evil that keeps humanity in a stranglehold.

Money earned that goes to shareholders rather than to the people who made the profits is stolen money.

So I am a left-wing liberal if you like. I call for strong workers’ rights, and I am convinced that trade unions are indispensable. 3.56 dollars a day for an employee is out of the question. Even $3.56 an hour is a joke.

In April, I averaged $3.56 a day on Medium. For that, I worked at least five hours a day. That makes an hourly wage of $0.71.

Why don’t I whine about this in some forums? Why do I not turn my back on this platform? Aren’t they exploiting me? I provide them with the content they need to attract paying subscribers.

If you’re not employed, you can’t think like an employee

The difference between an employee and me is enormous. Nobody determines when I have to be where and how much I have to work. Every day I can decide anew what I do, how I do it, and whether I do anything at all.

Nevertheless, the platform I write for benefits from my work. Shouldn’t they pay me better then? One could still think that all the writers who produce the content on the platform are exploited.

We sacrifice our time to bring traffic and subscribers to the platform. Should we not be paid like employees? Shouldn’t we get a fixed amount per article?

Many will answer these questions with the utmost conviction with yes. It all looks like hordes of cheap workers are exploiting themselves to make a big and financially stable platform even more prominent and more prosperous.

There is only one catch: We are not employees. Of course, that alone would not be a reason to accept such low pay. The Mechanical Turks of Amazon are not employees either, but in their case, I would still speak clearly of exploitation.

There’s a difference between working on clearly defined jobs, as underpaid crowd workers do and writing and publishing whatever I want, without anyone giving me any instructions as to the type and quantity of my texts.

Content mills, where freelancers work on customer orders for the platform for pennies, are exploiters.

Amazon is an exploiter when it feeds its crowd workers with ridiculous amounts of money.

Uber is an exploiter because it employs people who do the same as permanent taxi drivers, but they get much less money and no social security.

Here, at Medium, however, things look different. Nothing that I publish on this platform becomes the property of Medium. I retain all rights to my texts and can withdraw them from the platform at any time and use them elsewhere. I can even leave them on Medium and earn money abroad at the same time.

Still, $3.56 a day is very little. Nobody can live on it. It is a small consolation that my content still belongs to me when I publish it on Medium.

So why should one invest so much work for this amount?

A bet on the future

The only reason why I will continue to sacrifice a lot of time for my Medium articles is a bet on the future.

At no time do I care about what I earn now or this month. When I write an article, I don’t count the hours and minutes I have spent on it, so that I can calculate an hourly wage later

.

I don’t ask myself what Medium owes me or whether the platform treats me fairly. If I don’t like it, I can always leave. Nobody forces me to publish here instead of on my own blog.

What really motivates me is the potential I see here. For the past two months, I’ve been one of the approximately eight percent of authors who have earned more than 100 dollars in a month on Medium. If I’ve made it this far, then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t become even more successful.

I know that it is possible to earn thousands of dollars a month here, even if only a few succeed.

Every article I write today can still earn money in two years. Every article that I publish here can later become part of a book, which in turn can make me money.

I can turn articles into videos and podcasts or develop courses from them. I can have them translated, and they can be discovered by people who contact me to work for them.

Every single article has unlimited opportunities that go far beyond Medium.

I could, of course, publish all these articles on my own blog, but why should I do that?

Medium has the audience, and we have the content. The difference is that we can withdraw our content entirely from Medium at any time.

But we could take the audience Medium brings us together with when we leave. All we have to do is get as many of our readers on our email lists as possible.

Am I crazy or smart?

I’ll leave it up to you to decide. I don’t care what anybody thinks about me, though.

Anyone who thinks I’m selling my soul and being exploited here is entitled to believe that. It’s okay.

I’ve decided to go down this road and not focus on short-term goals. I delude myself that I’m using Medium more than the platform is using me.

Maybe I’m an idiot if I think I can succeed here more than most. Time will tell. I’m willing to take that risk.

But I don’t think I’ll fail. I am so confident because I have already achieved what I am striving for here, elsewhere.

I published my first e-book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform in 2012, after which I wrote and published more books for four years without making any significant money.

In 2015 I changed genres and published my first thriller. From then on, things went uphill. My most successful month brought me over 8000 €. Until October 2018, I wrote after work because I still had a full-time job. Nevertheless, I published a novel with over three hundred pages every two months.

Today I still earn between 2500 and 3000 € per month with my books. Since November 2018, I am a full-time author. I quit my job, and today I live from writing.

Maybe that’s why it’s easier for me to believe that I can also make it on Medium.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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