My Medium earnings dropped a face-melting 40% (why I’m not worried)

Well, as predicted, the day came — and it was just as ugly as I thought it would be.

I knew my final Medium earnings numbers for my sixth month were going to be bad, and bad they were.

In Month 4, on the strength of a viral story that just kept on giving, I made $1,235. In Month 5, I saw a significant drop down to a shade over $1,000, but again, that viral story was still propping me up.

So what happened in February?

Let me walk you through the numbers, explain what happened, and then I’ll tell you why I’m not worried at all.

My earnings got nuked during this period of time. (Credit: James Gordon/Dall-E 2)

The numbers

First of all, as I mentioned, I knew this was coming.

I even wrote this article about it and recorded the following video:

The TL;DR version is that I made less money because I did a lot less work.

My article output has been steadily falling from 50+ in September to 15 in each of January and February.

Why the big drop in these deep winter months?

Because I was laying out the groundwork for more money-making opportunities, including:

Creating two websites from scratch
Launching three new Substack newsletters (quitting alcohol, side hustling, and investing)
Pumping up my YouTube output

So my earnings went from this:

To this:

Yikes! That represents around a 40% drop month-over-month.

Now, typically I recommend focusing almost all your time and effort solely on what gets you paid. Building those other products cost me a lot of money in the short term.

There are a couple of reasons I’m not worried about the long-term, however.

The groundwork is done

With this new infrastructure in place on several different platforms, I’ve expanded my reach by a lot.

Also, pretty much everything I do on other platforms links back to my work on Medium, which brings in more views, earnings, and potential referred members.

Now that the work is done, it requires very little maintenance to keep my presence on those other platforms going. The content I write on Medium serves as the foundation for my content on those platforms.

My viral article is taking off — again!

Here’s a quick look at what’s happening right now. See anything interesting?

I thought this story was dead, but it lives again. (Author’s screen cap).

One thing you need to wrap your head around as a content creator is that you’re going to see MASSIVE variance in both your views and earnings.

The reality is that the 80/20 principle (use my affiliate link and get this fascinating book if you haven’t read it) applies to this business too.

Most of your engagement and earnings will come from a tiny fraction of your overall work.

I’ve written several pieces on why I thought this article blew up, and you can find those in my profile. You could also just watch these two videos where I go over a lot of the same stuff:

There are many little tweaks you can make to increase your odds of hitting a viral story, but at the end of the day, you simply don’t know what’s actually going to go viral.

This is the power of publishing a lot.

If you have 100 darts and someone else has 10, who do you think will have hit the bullseye more when all is said and done?

When it comes to earnings, there’s also a lot of power in having a big back catalog.

I only have around 150 published articles over at my main account James Julian, yet those articles helped push my average daily views in February to between 250–400 per day despite the fact I only published 15 articles.

That also means I earned $21.95 per day despite only working 11.25 hours on Medium the entire month!

(Side note: you’ll know this already if you follow me, but for the new readers, it takes me about 45 minutes to write a 1,000-word article. So, 15 x 45 minutes / 60 = 11.25 hours of work).

Also keep in mind also that I’m paid in USD, which means I’m actually making closer to $30 per day in my home country of Canada’s currency.

I’m not crying about the exchange rate as long as I’m bringing in US greenbacks!

If you’re interested, I track my daily side hustle income in a spreadsheet. Here’s a look at my February:

Looking forward

I do expect my earnings to go up in March for a couple of reasons:

With all the foundational work done on the other platforms, I’m hoping to push my Medium output at James Julian back into the neighborhood of 25 posts overall.
As I mentioned, the viral story is waking up again — and bringing new eyes to all my other previous work.

What it comes down to is this: stay consistent and you’ll drastically improve your odds of making money online writing on Medium.

Quality matters, but the most important thing is showing up to work.

If you’re interested in how I approach writing on Medium and are interested in getting a bunch of valuable tips, my 2023 video tutorial is a great place to start:

Good luck, everyone!

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