Quantifying My 4 Years of Writing on Medium

Is earning from writing on Medium sustainable?

Just like any other Medium writer, I wonder how my writing on Medium has fared over the years. How do I measure it? Anything I need to change to improve? And most importantly, is what I’m doing sustainable?

On the web, there is not much to use as a reference point. Medium does publish some statistics through their monthly emails. Below is the data for April 2020.

• 64% of writers or publications who wrote at least one story for members earned money.
• 6.9% of active writers earned over $100.
• $17,126.40 was the most earned by a writer, and $5,099.90 was the most earned for a single story.

So I know I’m in the 6.9% category. But I want to know more.

Medium is kind enough to provide us with Medium Writer stats and the Medium Partner Program dashboard to let us know how we are doing.

I did a little work and extracted the data to put into an Excel file, and then processed it. Here I’m sharing with you my findings. Hopefully, they will help as a reference point for you.

A Little About Me

Before getting into the data analysis, it’s important to know who I am as a writer. Knowing this will help you to know how applicable what I share is.

If I am already a celebrity, then the data I present is only applicable to celebrity status. Fortunately — or rather, unfortunately — I am not.

• I am a software developer who was never a technical writer.
• English is not my first language, and hence my writing sometimes contains lots of bad English. I’ve been using Grammarly recently to improve it.
• I write mainly on technical topics, having started off mainly for myself so that I remember what I learn.
• Readers who read my articles are interested in technical stuff and not particular about English grammar (not an excuse for me to not improve myself, though).

Some Data Now

I began writing on May 8, 2016, which means another five days will mark my fourth year writing on Medium!

I joined the Medium Partner Program the moment it began at the end of 2017. So I have two and a half years of experience in the program and have accumulated quite a bit of data on how I have done through the months and years.

Up till today, before submitting this writeup, I have had a total of 306 articles over the four years. Last year, I wrote an average of 1.5 articles a week.

At the end of April 2020, I now have 5,117 followers, 833 of them Medium members.

Wonder how I know how many of my followers are Medium members? In the article below, I share what I did to find out.

Over the Years

My 306 articles have

• 3.41 million views, with an average of 11.1 thousand views per article.
• 1.52 million reads, with an average of 5 thousand reads per article
• 17.7 thousand fans, with an average of 57.8 fans (that clap) per article
• I can’t get the clap count as well as the total member time viewed. (Let me know if there’s any easy way to extract them.)

Earnings

With my 306 articles, for a duration of about 2.5 years, I have earned $6.6K, with an average of $21 per article.

Having said that, not each article earns equally compared to others. Some earn more and some less. I have sorted the data below.

Eighty-two of my articles contribute 80% of my earnings. Eighty-two is 26% of my total articles. Hence the 80–20 law (Pareto principle) applies here.

Month-to-Month Performance

Let’s look at month-to-month performance.

I plotted a graph where I measure the earnings from the articles written for the particular month (in red) as well as the earnings from older articles (blue) below.

I could see these trends:

• Overall earnings are going up (the black dotted line) — a good sign overall.
• The dip at the end of the month of October is where Medium provides a few days' earnings in October, where they pay the differences of the day. In November onwards, the payment is on the exact month.
• From the month of May till October 2019, I had quite a bit of extra earnings contributed by new articles written for the month — happy moments.
• In general, the contribution of older articles is increasing over the months. This is a good sign, as the blue line shows that if I don’t write for the month, that’s possibly how I get my earnings.

Yearly contribution

Instead of looking at the contribution of new articles written during the month vs. the older articles, I grouped them by year, i.e., articles written in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

From the graph, I could see the following.

• Articles written in 2016 and 2017 contribute a little over the years, steadily.
• Articles written in 2018 seem to contribute steadily over the months. The lifespan of the articles seems good.
• Articles written in 2019 did amazingly well during the year but have decreased in current months. Still, they’re not a bad percentage.
• Articles written in 2020 are slowly making bigger contributions.

From the graph, we can clearly see that, even though the earnings are not much at the start, they do accumulate over the years. Patience is gold.

Claps vs. Reading Time

If you joined the Medium Partner Program before October 2017, you might remember the Medium Partner Program payment system was different in October 2017 and earlier.

In October 2017 and earlier, it was mostly based on claps from the readers of the articles. The more claps you got, the more payment you got.

After October 2017, the new system looks at the time readers spend on the articles.

I don’t have an easy way to correlate my claps to the articles. What I did is I plotted the graph below, which provides some good insight into how the change affected my earnings.

Let me illustrate. There are two components to the graph.

• The ratio of articles earning to those not earning, where the red section is the percentage of articles not earning, and the blue section is the percentage of the articles that are earning for the particular month
• The green line is the average earnings per article of all the articles that are earning (i.e., articles that are not earning are not included).

From the graph above, we can see that during the clap system days, less than 20% of my articles are earning. Eighty percent of them are not earning anything over the months. However, they earn at a much higher average per article, about $5 per article.

After the introduction of reading time payment in November 2019, the percentage of articles that got payment increased to almost 80%, which left about 20% not earning. This seems to be very good. However, the earnings per article have dropped significantly, to about slightly above $1 per article. This means that even though more articles are earning, they earn at a very small amount.

What I Learned

That’s my four years of accumulated experience. A little extraction of the data for analysis provided me some insights, as below.

• The reading time payment system encourages more articles to be paid, even for articles without any claps, but your average earnings per article will be reduced.
• An article will slowly accumulate its earnings over time. Don’t be dismayed if it doesn’t generate a lot at the beginning. Keep going. It will accumulate. Be patient.
• The 80–20 law (Pareto principle) still applies. Not all articles will perform the same as the others. Eighty percent of your hard work may seem not effective, but 20% of it will yield results.
• Keep writing. Don’t expect that the articles you write will continue to contribute the same amount every month. They might slow down, so it’s important to ensure new articles are in place. The pace of 1.5 articles per week seems to yield well.

That’s my part of the story on my four years of writing journey. Yours may differ. But I hope it gave you a quantified understanding of how the system works, and that you can make the best from it. Thanks for reading.

If you would also like to extract your data for analysis, do check out the article below.