The 80/20 Rule for Medium

An analysis of 8 months and 297 stories

You may be familiar with the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of your profits or earnings come from 20% of your customers or products. How does this relate to writing for Medium? And how can it be used to improve earnings while decreasing the time spent writing?

Analyzing articles

I conducted a thorough analysis of all of my articles that had been published through the end of October. There were 297 published articles. Not counting the various Medium bonuses for audience engagement or new member enrollment, the articles earned a total of $391.14.

According to the 80/20 rule, I should expect that approximately 60 of those stories (20% of 297 is 59.4) should produce about $313 in earnings.

What I found is that I only needed 44 stories to produce $312.81 in earnings. That’s closer to 15% than 20%. (An 80/15 ratio.) In other words, 85% of my stories produced only 20% of my earnings.

But that alone doesn’t show the steep drop off. My top 10 stories (about 3%) were responsible for $233.65 in earnings (about 60%). That’s a 60/3 ratio!

Even more extreme, my top 5 stories accounted for 51% of earnings. My top 3 accounted for 41% of earnings. And my #1 most read story, with some 3k views, alone contributed 27% of my earnings.

Analyzing publications

That tells me which stories earned the lion’s share of my payments during those 8 months. But everyone knows that writing an article that goes viral can do wonderful things for your earnings. That doesn’t mean you can predict which articles will do well, let alone go viral.

So perhaps a better way to determine which articles are pulling their weight and which are not is to analyze the publications they appear in. Over those 8 months, I published articles in 21 different publications. Did the 80/20 rule correspond to publications as well?

It didn’t correspond to the number of articles, since 150 articles appeared in a single publication (The Daily Cuppa). However, I’m a featured author there, and the editor publishes one article by me at the same time every day. So that throws all the statistics out the window.

Of the 147 other articles published over those 8 months, 59 were published by Getting Ready for the New Day, which was my own publication. So those don’t statistically count, either. I also self-published 5 other articles.

So, looking at the 83 articles published in other people’s publications that I did not have a committed relationship with, how did they compute?

By ratio of stories published

80% of the 83 articles would be about 66 articles. So, did 20% of the 19 publications publish around 66 articles?

20% of 19 publications is around 4 publications. The top 4 publications published, respectively, 15, 11, 8, and 7 articles. That comes out to 41 articles, or about 49% of the total. That would be a 49/20 ratio.

So, while the number of articles per publication is definitely distributed unevenly, it’s nowhere close to an 80/20 ratio.

This makes sense, because I tried many of these publications with 1 or 2 articles before determining that they weren’t worth the effort of writing for. (The worst-paying market averaged .11 per article. That’s a total waste of time, because it means no one is reading what I write.)

By ratio of earnings

Again, only looking at those 83 articles in 19 publications, how did they fare by ratio of earnings?

The top 4 publications earned 77% of the total earnings for those 83 articles. (In case you wondered, they published a total of 25 articles.) That’s a 77/20 ratio, which is pretty close to 80/20.

Within a publication

Just for giggles, I also analyzed the results within a single publication. In this case, I analyzed my articles for Start It Up and Feedium.

Start It Up published 4 articles, including my #1 article, which earned $106.05. In descending order, other articles earned $12.81, $4.67, and $1.79. The ratio for earnings in this case is 85/25. (You can’t do 20% with only 4 articles.)

Feedium published 15 of my articles, so 20% would be 3 articles. The top earner in that publication made 30.34, with articles 2 and 3 earning 6.27 and 4.82, respectively. There was kind of a clump in the mid 4-dollar range, with another one earning 4.64 and a third earning 4.35. So I also figured out the ratio for the top 5 (33%) of articles.

Feedium’s ratio for the top 3 was 66/20. The ratio for the top 5 was 81/33.

To me, that indicates that the earnings in Start It Up were more wildly variable, while the earnings from Feedium were a little more predictable. There was still a wide swing in results from Feedium, since the lowest earning article made only $.19. But 4/5 of them earned at least $1.

What does this all mean?

The 80/20 rule is good for figuring out where you should focus your time, and where you should stop wasting time.

Of the 19 publications, 9 averaged less than a dollar per story in earnings. 1 of those was a new publication, so it might pick up. But the other 8 are off my list of places to write for.

My 4 best publications, in terms of total revenue, were Start It Up, Feedium, Catness, and The Writing Cooperative. These were also the best on average, averaging at least $4 per article, although as shown above, the actual earnings per article varied widely within a publication.

In the future, I should try to write more long articles about startups, writing on Medium, cats, and my career as a fiction writer.

The Daily Cuppa articles don’t pay much per article, since they’re short forms, but I can write a week’s worth in a few hours. They’re great for reader engagement, picking up new followers, and other non-financial metrics.

How you can use this for your writing?

This is part you really care about, isn’t it? What does this mean for your future writing on Medium?

You can either go through all of the articles you’ve published to date, or if you’ve been writing for a while, pick the top few articles in each month. If you published 20 articles in a month, the 4 best performing articles would be your top 20%.

Figure out how much your top 20% of articles earned. Then divide that by the total amount of money you earned from Medium (not counting any bonuses). That gives you a ratio of X/20.

The closer the ratio is to 20/20, the more evenly your articles perform. In that case, you’re already pretty optimized. Try new topics or new publications, and see if you can find something that performs better than your current standard.

The closer the ratio is to 100/20, the more your earnings are determined by those top 20% of articles. Figure out if there are particular publications, topics, or formats that are common to those top performers. Then do more of them.

A word of caution, though. Don’t focus only on those top performing criteria. You don’t want to saturate your marketplace, or burn yourself out on a topic. Other writers have tried to write in only their top performing categories, and their overall earnings took a dive. They also started hating what they were writing.

If you cut out your worst-performing 20%, and double your top-performing 20%, you can dramatically increase your earnings for the same amount of work you do now.

Good luck!

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