The T-Rex That Ate My Medium Revenue
How I made 1 cent on a 1,000 reads
Laugh-O-Saurus
On Dec 23, 2021. I published an article called “A Real Jurassic Park. 70-million-year-old Perfectly Preserved Baby Dinosaur Raises New Questions.”
It was what I would describe as silly science. The story about resurrecting dinosaurs from preserved DNA was speculative fiction.
I never thought anyone would care or find it interesting. It sat on my paywall like dead DNA until January 23. Exactly on that day and one day only. The article exploded 0-2K reads! My heart skipped a beat in shock and I kissed my mouse. I had gone viral?
Never mind the same story was published on NewsBreak too. Over the same period the article got 667K views, 37K reads, and 441 shares.
On Medium it was tagged to the mothball museum?
I have been on Medium for 6 months and I had one story called “How to Drink Yourself to Death in Bali” back in October 2021 earned $70.00.
Up to January 23, out of my 62 published pieces (1/2 curated) that is my only revenue success.
Once the excitement wore off I looked again and saw my extinct story about an extinct topic earned only 1 penny. That’s right ladies and gentlemen .001 cent. It had zero Medium reads. All the reads were external.
The takeaway
What happened is evidence of the power of Medium’s search engine ranking capability. And how getting read on Medium can be a matter of luck. The title “Jurassic Park” was Google juice and it ranked high. Fans of the film franchise probably wanted to know what it was about. Why one day? A classroom of Chinese students Googled it?
Writing about pop iconic content may not always be a sure-fired win. But in the public space, it stands a better shot than your life as a struggling blogger on EBT.
I was fortunate I had placed the article elsewhere. Where external reads were monetized.
Does this mean going forward all my articles will be about famous content? I hope not. On being a topic specialist, another Medium writer said after months of earning $1,000 per month for writing about UFO’s he quit because it was too boring.
I am by heart a Creative Writer versus a blog writer. What do I mean by creative writing? Blog writing can be creative too. Is writing to the heart of the plot, character, dialogue, place, theme, time, etc. Elements of style you would find in fiction. Blog writing is generally more persuasive. Less formal, and first-person i.e. pushing the reader into “something.” There’s an underlying buy-in subtext in the narrative.
I don’t know how to improve your life. I offer metaphor and Zen koans instead. Even though the $50,000 first prize Medium writer contest winner last summer was won by a fiction story.
What do you call a dinosaur that never gives up? Try-try-try-ceratops!
Other stories from the lower Jurassic exhibit.
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