The Value of a fan — my highest earning piece on Medium last month only had seven fans

My last earnings-report taught me a surprising lesson

One thing I must make clear right at the beginning of this article: I am far from being a top earner on Medium. So I can’t give anyone tips on how to make a lot of money on this platform, and I can’t claim to be an expert in this field.

My trip here started in February 2019, and it’s only been about three months since I’ve been writing articles regularly. September has been my most profitable month to date, at $56.90. So I am an absolute beginner on this platform.

On the other hand, I have been earning my money exclusively by writing for a year now. I am a thriller writer who has made €160,000 to date from books I have published on Amazon (in Germany).

My best month was over 8.000 €. In total, I have sold over 200,000 ebooks.

I may be a newcomer to Medium, but when it comes to operating in a highly competitive environment, I have a lot of experience.

One of the most critical skills you need to be a successful taker in a highly competitive market is the ability to analyze the numbers that each platform provides.

They tell us what the audience wants, how we have to position ourselves with our work, and partly also how the algorithms that the platform uses work.

This article is only about a small building block for understanding how Medium pays for our work.

No strategy is derived from this, and no one will suddenly earn more money after reading this article. But maybe one or the other looks a little more relaxed at his statistics after reading this article.

The numbers

The article that made me the most money in September earned me $6.59.

It got 64 claps at 33 views, five reads, and a read ratio of 56%. The 64 claps came from seven different readers. Six of them clapped between one and four times, and one gave me 50 claps.

At first sight, these numbers are unspectacular.

I have stories that got well over 200 claps in a week and still made less money. Other articles had over 2,000 views and made almost no money.

So how can it be that 64 claps from seven paying members are enough to make this article so successful? For comparison: Another article, which has twice as many fans, only brought it up to 4$ in two weeks.

Let’s see how much each individual clap and fan was worth in my most successful article:

1 clap = 10.3 cents

1 fan = 94.14 cents

And now we’re looking at the article that made $4 so far:

It had 33 views, 11 reads, a read ratio of 33%, and 246 claps of 14 fans.

5 fans clapped between one and five times, four between 15 and 20 times and four between 30 and 50 times.

1 clap = 1.63 cents

1 fan = 28.6 cents

What’s the difference between the two stories? Why is a clap in the first article worth 10.3 cents, while in the second it is only 1.63 cents?

If you take a closer look, you will quickly notice that the average number of claps per fan for the second article is much higher than in the first article.

In the second article, each fan clapped an average of 17.5 times, while in the first, the more successful, it was only 9.14 claps per fan.

The average claps per fan for the less successful article were almost twice as high as for, the more successful piece.

Interpretation of the numbers

At first, it seems that it is better to get fewer claps per fan because then the value of the single claps is higher.

But that’s a deception. Of course, Medium doesn’t pay us the better per clap, the less we get. That would be completely illogical.

So why is a clap sometimes worth more and sometimes less?

To answer this question, we need to know where the money comes from, which Medium pays out to its authors. The only source of income that Medium has is the membership fee of $5 a month per paying member.

An unknown part of this $5 is paid to the authors. Admittedly we only know that claps are paid. Views, comments, other interactions are not paid according to the opinion of experienced authors.

Each reader can distribute up to 50 claps per article. We don’t know how many claps can be distributed per month, but that’s not important either. What is important is that each paying member is worth a maximum of $5 per month for all authors.

That means, the more claps a reader distributes, the less every single clap of this reader is worth.

So if you applaud a lot and often, you will earn the respective author much less money per clap than if you use your claps sparingly.

If we now look at my two articles again, we come to the following conclusion: The fans of the second article applaud on average more often and distribute, on average more claps per article than the fans of the first article.

Why is that so? I have to speculate, but I don’t think the solution is that complicated. My less successful article deals with Medium and has, therefore, mainly Medium authors as a target group.

The article, where the single clap was much more valuable, is aimed at a much wider audience. Here I also reach paying members who do not write themselves but are exclusively on Medium to read articles.

In my opinion, the difference between the two target groups is due to the different values of the individual claps and fans.

Why? Medium authors usually know the platform very well. They know precisely that you can distribute more than one clap, which should be unknown to many pure readers.

There is also a lot of solidarity among the authors. We try to support other authors and therefore clap for many more articles per month than one reader who doesn’t write on Medium himself. Also, the authors distribute more claps per item because they believe they are helping other authors more.

Conclusion

What use is this knowledge to us? We know that the fewer claps a reader distributes on average, the more valuable the claps are. Now, of course, we can’t influence how our readers behave when they clap. How can we still use this knowledge to our advantage?

1) In the author groups on Facebook, the realization should prevail that we are not doing our colleagues any favors if we give each article the maximum number of claps. If we reduce our average number of claps from 50 to 1, our claps will become 50 times more valuable in the midterm.

2) if this is not the case, we should bear in mind that media authors have less monetary value as a target group than the general public, which is only on the platform for reading. That means that we should broaden our thematic scope.

Although I now know that articles about Medium attract more readers, but make less money per clap, I will continue to write about Medium from time to time.

The worst thing you can do as an author is to think only of money with every word you write.

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