I’m Experimenting With Vocal Media
It’s like Medium — you get paid for blog views
I like the idea of making money online for blog reads. So I decided to join Vocal Media. It’s a lot like Medium, but without the paywall.
However, my experience of Vocal Media has been frustrating so far. I opened an account, and was presented with a series of error messages when I tried to connect to Stripe for payment. This was eventually resolved after I contacted Stripe to explain the problem with my out-of-date photo ID. So far, so good.
I then joined Vocal+ which offers 2 months free membership, and enhanced earnings for that period. I can cancel after 2 months, so it’s worth a punt.
I started writing articles…
- But found I couldn’t copy and paste into the user interface…
- I couldn’t type in the body of the article at all!
- It transpired it doesn’t work on Firefox.
- It crashed on Chrome.
- I eventually got it working on Edge!
- I now have four stories published and four awaiting approval.
- So far, so good!
Weaknesses
The weaknesses — apart from a very glitchy interface — seem to me, to be around categorization. There are no publications to submit to. You assign your work to categories instead.
It’s quite hard to find suitable categories for some of my pieces — those on history, or gardens, for example. It’s more focused on contemporary topics, although I was struggling to find a good place for a piece on entertainment yesterday.
You also have to wait for all your blogs to be approved before they are published. This can take some time. And they won’t approve anything less than 600 words.
Strengths
You can hit the ground running with Vocal Media, because you don’t need to grow your follower base. There are no followers, so there’s no reason to hold back from publishing everything you’ve got right away… as far as I know! In fact, the benefit of publishing early, is that all your stories can benefit from the free two month period on enhanced earnings with Vocal+.
Good Earnings?
An acquaintance says he’s earnt more on Vocal Media than on Medium. That’s why I thought I’d give it a go! I can repost a lot of my Medium pieces on the platform, so it requires relatively little work.
How’s it work?
Vocal Media works differently — there is no paywall. Anyone can read your posts, so you get more views, but you get paid less per view. People can send you tips to say thank you, so that might boost your income too.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes when my earnings start to roll in!
