Medium Earnings

Medium Partner Program Earnings Breakdown (How I Earned $1,000+ in July of 2020)

Increasing Medium Earnings by Focusing on Long Tail Earnings

Note: While this article does contain earnings details about how much money I made writing on Medium, the purpose of this article is to explain the importance of building a back catalogue of articles and long tail earnings. It is not meant to suggest that writing on Medium is a great way to get rich. It’s not. Writing can be monetized through the emerging passion economy, but it takes years of effort and is not at all the ideal money making solution. I typically don’t talk about my personal earnings (more the mechanics and strategies of Medium), so I wanted to underscore this point.

Many writers spend little time analyzing what did or did not work in their past blogging efforts. Many simply press publish and hope for the best. And even if they do take the time to reflect, they usually draw very limited conclusions.

For example, a writer may try to recreate a top earning article which they published in the previous month.

There are many limitations to this approach:

1. The article that had the highest earnings in previous months could reflect a passing trend on Medium. A good example of this would be articles on a health emergency or predictions leading up to a major event.
2. The article that had the highest earnings in previous months may not be replicable. If you write an article explaining a very intimate moment in your life (i.e. How My Parents Reacted When I Came Out or That Time I Made Out with My Celebrity Crush), you typically cannot write about this one experience over and over (although some writers do try very hard to circumvent this limitation 😉).
3. The article that had the highest earnings in previous months may have taken disproportionately longer to write. Writing stories on Medium is like any other creative venture, as much as you enjoy it, you have to balance the time it requires vs. the amount of free time you have available. If an article takes 2 months to write, while it may be fantastic in quality, you may not have allocated your Medium writing time correctly.

There are many other limitations to basing your writing solely off of the performance of your top article from previous months. And yet, I see many writers following this exact strategy.

Taking the three limitations mentioned above together, you can define a broad limitation:

Basing your future articles off of the sole performance of your past top earning article ignores the fundamental realities of digital publishing and long tail earnings.

In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Chris Anderson puts forth several unique ideas. The first is that merchandise assortments are growing because when goods don’t have to be displayed on store shelves, physical and cost constraints on selection disappear. Search and recommendation tools can keep a selection’s vastness from overwhelming customers.

When applied to writing on Medium, the theory of long tail earnings can be rephrased as:

Due to the rise of digital publishing platforms (like Medium), readers can find and afford articles more closely tailored to their individual tastes, leading them away from homogenized viral articles.

This article will examine the possibility of earning money through the Medium Partner Program, by focusing on articles that:

• Do not go viral on the Medium platform;
• Earn some form of income in the months after their initial publication;
• And they fit into a larger back catalogue of consistently earnings articles as opposed to one-off hits.

For this case study I will use my July 2020 Medium Partner Program earnings.

Earnings Overview:

In July 2020 I earned $1,054.60 through the Medium Partner Program This only includes my primary account (@caseybotticello). As many of my regular readers know, I have several accounts.

• This monthly total represents earnings from 228 articles that earned at least $.01.
• The highest earning article made $158.35, the lowest earning article made $.01.
• 179 of 228 articles earned less than $5

Distribution of articles by individual earnings brackets:

<$1 — There were 92 articles that earned less than $1, for a total of $29.

$1.00-$4.99 — There were 87 articles that earned between $1-$4.99 for a total of $210.

$5.00-$24.99 — There were 42 articles that earned between $5-$24.99, for a total of $416.

$25.00-$158.35 — There were 7 articles that earned between $25-$158.35, for a total of $399.

A few things jump out right away:

• Yes, the seven highest earning articles account for 38% of the aggregate monthly earnings. So these articles do represent a fair amount of the total earnings.
• However, the $5.00-$24.99 bracket actually represents the plurality of the monthly earnings at 39%.
• 62% of the aggregate earnings come from article making less than $25 per month.

What is interesting is that this ratio has been fairly consistent for me for the past few months.

I suspect de-emphasizing curation in my Medium strategy, may have led to some short term losses, but it also created a much more steady and consistent flow of revenue.

However, neither of these graphs depict the number that I care most about:

The percentage of my earnings derived from articles not published in the past month.

It would be misleading to call this pure passive income, but it does have some of the characteristics of passive income.

What is my “passive income” target?

80%.

And since I began focusing on creating content that reaches more people over time, is SEO optimized, and is created as part of a greater content web, I have been hitting this milestone, consistently.

I am sure if I published more under this Medium account I would earn more. But this would devalue my time and lead to a lower ROI.

I would inevitably start to produce less content that maintains traction over time or produce content that is less valuable to my readers.

I view my back catalogue of Medium articles as a portfolio of digital assets, much like I view my self published books on Amazon KDP, stock photography, and my growing list of digital products that I sell directly on Gumroad.

This strategy of building a valuable back catalogue definitely is not for those looking to earn money writing on Medium quickly.

But it is an effective strategy for building enduring content that is not affected by most algorithm changes.

I am not sure how it will fare against the major upcoming platform change on Medium, but I think it gives my content a fighting chance.

— Casey Botticello

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions. Be sure to sign up for the Blogging Guide newsletter, to get the latest tips, tricks, and news about writing on Medium and to join our Facebook group, Medium Writing, to share your latest Medium posts and connect with other writers.

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Casey Botticello is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blogging Guide, an online community of writers with an award-winning newsletter. He is also the creator of the popular Medium Writing Course and the Substack Newsletter Course.

Casey previously worked at several tech startups, a lobbying & strategic communications firm, and has created several businesses of his own. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, follow his Medium publications, Digital Marketing Lab and Medium Blogging Guide, or reach out to him directly on his personal website.