What I Discovered About Views Make a Shocking Difference in Earnings

Here’s what we know

If you’re a medium writer, chances are you regularly check your story stats. As content creators, we all anticipate that moment of virality and that steep incline in views and more importantly, earnings.

However, understanding your stats is a fundamental part of improving your chance of going viral and the welfare of your future articles in general.

Stats help you identify your audience, and recognize mistakes or an advantage; they help writers build experience and find success through trial and error.

To find those errors, you need to be able to analyze your stats well.

Internal and External views constitute your total views for every one of your articles. But what’s the difference?

Internal Views

Internal views simply refer to internal traffic; the views/traffic you get from Medium’s article distribution. These are the views you get internally through Medium.

Some examples include Medium Daily Digest emails, the Medium app and website, or their own social media accounts.

External Views

To sum up, external views are basically everything else. All your article views that don’t come from Medium’s own distribution channels count towards this. Some examples include Google search or social media sharing.

A shocking difference

Here are the stats for my very first article on Medium:

For a first article, the views are quite decent. However, you may notice that most of the views (91%) are external. This changes everything in terms of earnings.

I take 1 hour to write articles on average, and a pathetic $3.39 made my wage at the beginning of my Medium career a mere $3.39/hour. For 2,700, this amount just seems too less.

Here are the stats for a later article I published:

The views for this one aren’t as impressive. However, the major difference that most of these views are internal (83%) versus external speaks volumes.

My hourly wage for this article has been upgraded to $68.40/hour, which is quite surprising considering I got 400 fewer views (it also has fewer reads).

From this, we can see the difference between internal and external views. The evident conclusion is that internal views are more valuable to writers in terms of earnings.

But how is this useful?

Understanding both types of views allows us to get a better sense of what we need/want for our articles.

In the case of Medium, we want to get internal views, because those are the ones that will most likely earn us money.

This is because Medium only pays writers for reading time from paying members and paying members are most likely to find your article via Medium’s own distribution channels.

Meanwhile, external views from people new to Medium and non-paying members don’t bring as many benefits both in terms of exposure and earning value.

This tells us what we should and shouldn’t be doing.

What we should NOT be doing

Now that we’ve established an understanding that external views aren’t going to be the most beneficial things for our articles, we should refrain from doing things that cost us time or money just to get them.

For example, online marketing isn’t going to be as effective unless you can guarantee that the exposure is worth it and it specifically targets active medium paying members.

To sum up, don’t make the mistake of doing paid campaigns or ads on other social media platforms. Also, refrain from posting or spamming on other sites; it’s frankly not worth your time which can be better spent cooking up more articles.

However, Twitter may be an exception as it is known for its connection to Medium, especially if you have a large existing audience there.

Other things like working on SEO for Google to make sure your article can be easily found is not going to bring you significant benefits.

Essentially, anything you do that helps you gain external views should NOT be a priority, as the largest benefit it can give you is potentially a boost in the Medium algorithm; but that isn’t even guaranteed.

Your time is better spent on doing the things that can help you with your earnings and exposure to the people that can contribute to that.

What we should do

Get internal views. These views matter more and bring more benefits to you in comparison to external views.

Get involved with the people actually associated with Medium. If an internal viewer is a member, you get money from reading time. If an internal member is not a member, there’s the possibility you’ll get a referred membership if they really like you.

Plus, there’s also that potential boost in the algorithm just like external views can give you.

To get internal views, there are a variety of solutions:

• Make your titles irresistible. Here is a link to a full guide and the shortcut.
• Get into large publications
• Get into large communities on Slack where you can share your articles with thousands of other Medium users
• Comment, clap and engage with other users on the platform (don’t do this to aggressively and excessively)
• Become a top writer

Do what matters

The key is to STOP doing the things many people often tell you to do that only help you gain external views. Focus on what truly matters, your articles themselves and building a presence on this platform instead of others.

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