I’m Not Giving Up On Vocal Media. Here’s Why

It works for me

I see a lot of people writing on here about Medium’s poor cousin, Vocal Media. Personally, I really like Vocal. I didn’t understand why it gets so much hate until I looked into the reasons why I love it and realised those are probably the same reasons why most Medium writers don’t. So, here’s the five reasons why I’m not giving up on Vocal, even though people keep telling me it’s a time-suck that pays poorly.

The challenges

From where I’m standing, most Medium members aren’t fiction writers, and the challenges are mostly creative writing competitions, so this won’t appeal to them. I use Vocal Media to post fiction at the moment — click here to see the kind of stuff I write (although please note if you click on an individual story once you’re over there, either I or the person who wrote it will earn a small amount from the click). It keeps it nice and simple, using Medium for non-fiction and Vocal for fiction.

Non-fiction does well on Medium and fiction does not.

Both do equally well, as far as I can see on Vocal Media, but the challenges they set, which offer the chance to win up to $1,000 really swing it for me and that’s why I keep writing on Vocal. I know that there are usually around a thousand entries on each challenge, which drastically reduces my chances of winning, but I live in hope.

The only thing is, you have to be a Vocal+ member to enter challenges. When I signed up to Vocal+ at the start of May 2023, they were offering a year for $40 so I snapped it up, because realistically, I would pay much more than that for all the writing competitions I enter each year. This is a way to enter competitions numerous times for a relatively small fee. It’s also worth noting though, that there’s no referral fee for getting someone to sign up to Vocal+, the way that the referral program works on Medium.

The payment system is straightforward

I love Medium but one of the things that confuses me (and others) is the payment system. It’s very unpredictable. Since Vocal pays per view, it’s pretty easy to predict how much you will make based on how many hits you get.

I’m a Vocal+ member so I get paid $6.00 for each 1,000 hits. I know that if I reach that number of hits, I get that amount in my wallet. Simple. I’m never going to get rich from that, but at least it’s easy to understand!

Where Medium is different is that, as you probably know since you’re on Medium, reading time is a factor. So you can write a really long article and get paid more for that because people probably spend longer reading it. On Vocal, it doesn’t matter how long your article is. It gets paid for a read whether it’s 100 words or 10,000.

The bonuses

At the time of writing this article, I’ve written 19 posts on Vocal Media. I got paid a bonus of $5 for my fifth post and $10 for my tenth post. Rumour has it that you get paid a bonus of $50 for your fiftieth post, which should not be too hard if I write something short every day. Right now, they’re doing a micro-fiction challenge which involves writing a complete story of between 50–100 words. It takes me twenty minutes to do that. None of them are diamonds, although they’re nice little stories, but they all count towards that magic fiftieth post.

The bonuses are the whole reason why I’ve made more money so far on Vocal than on Medium. They are the reason why I keep writing on Vocal… for the moment. Once I reach that fiftieth article and get the $50 bonus that’s meant to be coming my way, I’m not sure if I’ll be active on the site on a daily basis.

You also get a bonus for a top story, but this is outwith your control.

The Community

Here on Medium, there’s a great community of writers. Everyone has so far been respectful and kind in my interactions with them, but I get major imposter syndrome when I’m here on Medium. Everyone’s so business-minded and ambitious. I’m learning how to be more business savvy, but I’m not quite there yet. There are a ton of people who are here just to make money and they’re doing it well, so I mostly visit articles to learn from them. Meanwhile, over on Vocal, there isn’t the same opportunity to earn. The potential is there, it’s just that it’s a different system to Medium and Medium seems to have spawned more success stories. So people tend to go to Vocal for different reasons and one of them is community.

I’m privileged to have met some really lovely people over on Vocal — like-minded individuals who are there to write fiction and poetry and read other people’s writing. Comments are frequent and in that way it’s not too different from Medium. It’s equally important on both platforms and we get to know the same names and faces over time.

It’s good to have a lot of different income streams

One of the things I’ve learned in the last decade of working online is that your income stream can easily vanish overnight, and it’s no exaggeration to make that statement. I remember in 2015 when KDP changed their payment system, I went from four figures a month to less than three. This was because they would pay writers per download in their Kindle Unlimited system, but then they started paying for page reads. So people like me who wrote novellas of less than 10,000 words had been doing really well. It took us a short time to write our books and we got paid for the whole book. It understandably upset the writers who were spending months or years writing 200,000 word epics, but to be honest, I felt that was a problem for them, not me — until Amazon changed the payment system. Now, I’m always careful never to put my eggs in one basket. I kept writing e-books but branched out into paperbacks, puzzle books, audiobooks, a blog, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, selling photos and now I’m using Medium and Vocal. If one of those income streams disappears, I will double my efforts with one of the others.

You see, I’m not someone who can stick to one thing and be happy at that one thing for months or years at a time. I get bored easily and that’s why having lots of little income streams works for me too. It’s more practical and better for me mentally.

Check out what else I do on Komi or Linktree.

If you enjoy reading stories like these and want to support me as a writer, consider signing up to become a Medium member. It’s $5 a month and gives you unlimited access to stories on Medium. If you sign up using my link, I’ll earn a small commission.