Newcomer’s Struggles on Medium

Will my tactics and stats make you laugh?

I’ve been on Medium for two months now. I must say I did know about Medium before — I found a few articles that helped me solve my problems, but I didn’t know that anyone could write here and earn some money.

A person who introduced Medium for me was Shelby Church. She published a YouTube video about this platform. Shelby is a successful influencer who was curious enough to try out and publish a few articles on Medium to see how much she could earn by writing here. I decided to give it a try too. Can Medium be an additional source of money? Can Medium remind me how creative I was 10 years ago?

So, a few days later, I already had my first two articles published. And they brought me 2 readers: my husband and his sister. I even got 7 claps (because my husband likes this number). I understood that there must be some secret about the broader audience that other writers have. And I was right. Zulie Rane has a very informative channel on YouTube, where she explains about curation, publications, gaining a bigger audience, and much more. After watching a few videos, I already had my plan:

1. Topics. Because it was just the beginning, I decided to experiment more. I decided to choose topics that were important in my life: programming, love, humanitarian problems, airplanes and other topics that are on my mind at the moment when I want to write. Many successful writers publish daily. Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of time, so my aim is to publish at least 1 article per week.
2. Publications I decided to choose publications that didn’t necessarily have many subscribers, but were active in publishing new articles. I didn’t know yet, that many of them did not want my articles :)
3. Curation After watching Zulie’s videos, I decided that this is probably the easiest part: you publish an article and after 2 hours — boom, your story is curated (well, it probably works for experienced writers only).

Reality

Numbers

My first two articles were about programming. I published them nowhere, but later decided to republish them in one of the publications. javinpaul kindly agreed to publish them in Javarevisited.

I was quite happy with the numbers of my second article, but it was not curated as expected! Harsh reality!

Anyway, this article is still my most popular article from those that were not curated and even so, the numbers are not so optimistic:

I expected, that articles about selling people or love in India and Indian culture would be very popular, but again — nobody cared about them!

Somebody wrote that stories about sex get more attention than other topics, so I decided to give it a try and wrote quite serious article about prostitution in the Netherlands.

I was fooled — a topic related to sex has not gotten more attention compared to other topics:

I noticed that programming related articles get ~40 times more attention than others, so I published a few more techy tutorials and a few of them were curated! I thought, I was on my way to a few hundred bucks, but oh well… 3 of them haven’t earned me more than 3 dollars in total and only one of them earned me a little bit more:

But you know what? Writing programming related articles requires many hours. I sometimes have to code before writing an article, to prepare examples and so on. I hope that these articles bring value to other programmers, but how can you create value if nobody reads them?

Alright, my last idea was to get attention from the Americans. I decided to write about American culture through the eyes of Europeans. I thought it might be interesting to people, but I was wrong — another failure !

Publications

In two months, I became a writer for nine publications. Some editors were very supportive, while others were not. Some of my articles were rejected by a number of publications before finding them a home.

I was very excited to start writing on Medium, but after many failures and rejections, my excitement was destroyed. The worst part for me was that the editors were not even replying to say “no”. That’s very upsetting. You don’t know if the editor has read your article yet, you don’t know if you should wait a few more days or submit it for another publication… Therefore, I decided to be more loyal to those publications that care about writers more. Also, I started to read more articles in those publications and support those writers that did not get much attention.

I wrote an email to the Medium team and suggested them to create a submission to publications system that would inform the writer if his or her article was rejected/approved/read/not read yet. However, it’s been a few weeks since I sent them my email, but the Medium team has not yet replied.

Curation

I wrote 13 articles in total and 12 of them were published behind Medium’s paywall. Only four of the articles were curated. To be honest, I don’t even know if this result is good or bad, but I was expecting better results!

I noticed that if my article gets curated, it happens during the first 3 hours after publishing it. If the article is not curated in a couple of hours, it means it will not be curated at all. I hope it’s not a rule…

I will continue to write and publish articles, just because I like it. I like to read and support other writers, but I really doubt that it is worth spending so much time for writing articles for money. There are way better ways to earn cash.