This Is How Much I Earned From My First 1,00,000 Views on Medium

Honestly, I’m still recovering from the shock

I started writing on Medium a couple of months back. I had always wanted to write for years but never had the guts to start, and the idea of even writing a word scares the hell out of me.

But it wasn’t until one day that I came across Shelby Church’s Youtube video “Making Money Online Writing for Medium… Is It Worth Your Time?”. And curiosity got the best out of me, so I clicked on that video.

And oh man I glad I did.

Inspired by her video, I finally gathered the courage to started writing on Medium. Honestly, I had no idea what I am going to write about or how I am going to do it — but I started anyway. You can say that I jumped in the deep sea of content writing without having a single clue of how I’ll be able to swim and survive.

I’ve been writing on Medium for 1 and a half months now and I’ve been lucky enough to hit that 1,00,000 total views mark. I know it isn’t that much but for a beginner like me, it matters…a lot.

One question every beginner has in their mind, that I did too, is that how much Medium actually pays. And it’s not a bad thing to be curious about — because people want to know if it could be worth their time or not.

So, How Much Medium Writers Make?

The answer is not that simple. So let’s break it down.

First: From Where Does Medium Pay Its Writers?

For those of you who don’t know Medium offers a $5/month premium plan to people who want to read an unlimited number of stories behind the paywall. Medium then distributes portions of that $5 across the articles each premium member reads/engages with.

In other words, Medium shares its revenue with its writers.

Second: How Medium Partner Program Algorithm Works?

The amount of money you earn through the Medium partner program depends on several factors like total views, internal views, no of reads, reading ratio, reading time.

But most important of all, it depends on 2 components:

(1) member’s reading time.

(2) monthly reading time members spend on your story

As Medium members spend more time reading your story (“member reading time”), you’ll earn more. The more time member spends reading your stories, the bigger the percentage of that $5 will be given to you — and the more you will earn.

And if that member spent his/her a percent of their monthly reading time on your story, then you’ll also be paid accordingly. For example, if last month a member spent 5% of their monthly reading time on your story, you will receive 5% of the portion of their subscription fee.

That’s why how much money writers make aren’t based on page views and no. of claps alone. A story can go viral but can fail to earn significant money if people don’t spend much time reading it.

NOTE: Medium doesn’t pay for non-members reading time — they will only calculate it if they become members within 30 days of reading your story.

Even though you somehow manage to bring huge traffic, the Medium algorithm will not work because Medium only pays you for member’s reading time — not for outside people and that’s why you need real people, i.e., premium members who spend a good amount of time reading your article.

To better understand this, below are insights of one of my story, which earned different amount of money through different days based upon the member’s reading time and their monthly’s reading time:

You can see that even though I got 576 views on March 28 but my earning was way higher than I got on March 11 with 2K views.

The high traffic doesn’t mean you’ll earn more — it totally depends on the member’s reading engagement with your story.

How Much I Earned From 1,00,000 Views?

Finally, coming to the interesting part of the article — How much I got paid for 1,00,000 views?

Well, while writing on Medium for one and a half months I had published 21 stories in total. However, the big percentage of the money I made was from the story that got 85K views — and I earned a decent amount of money from another story with 10K views.

Story 1 — With 85,000 Views

This was the 2nd article I ever wrote on Medium. When I wrote this story “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century Isn’t ‘Sexy’ Anymore” I didn’t expect anything to be honest. Because before it one of the articles that I published didn’t perform that well.

So, I just published it without expecting anything much.

But the next day when I woke up I was shocked to see that not only my article got curated, it had over 575+views and on the sixth day, my stats total went insane. The article got 21K+views in just 24 hours. And it didn’t stop there.

50K+ in a week

60K+ in 15 days

Pretty crazy right? And after almost one and a half months of that article been published, it got a total of 85K+ views with 67K internal views and 17.5K external views.

I earned $2,423.55 from 85,000 views on this article.

I for sure as hell didn’t expect that. As I said before, that total views didn’t affect that much the amount of money you earn — it’s member’s reading engagement that matters. The reason why this article made that much amount of money is that it got the majority of traffic internally i.e. 79% with 738 hr 55 min member's reading time.

Story 2 — With 10,000 Views

This was the story that I wrote about “Top 5 Most Demanding Programming Languages to Learn in 2021”. When I published this story it didn’t get many views until one month later. After a month of publishing, this story, its view spikes went very high. And at this time of writing, this story had 10,000 views.

Since this story has fewer views than the other one but still its internal view percentage is higher than that one i.e. 8.4K and its member reading time is 94hr 57 min. Since its member reading engagement is not that much as the other one so I earned only fewer dollars from this one.

I earned $190.22 from 10,000 views on this article

Other Stories — With a total of 5000 views

The above of my stories get the higher no of views — and there were also other stories that contributed to getting me left 5,000 views which contributed in total 1,00,000 views.

I earned $131.23 from the other stories that have 5000 views in total

TOTAL EARNINGS:

Combining all the earnings from the stories that contributed to getting a total of 1,00,000 views — I earned:

$2423.55+$190.22+$131.23=$2745

In total, I earned $2745 from 1,00,000 views on Medium

The money you make on Medium can vary greatly. While there are so many factors that go into how much a story can earn (reading ratio, total views, topic, trends, internal views) but mainly it’s all dependent on how much time a medium paid member spends his/her time reading your story —many of people who have hit the 1,00,000 views may have earned more than me if they have a higher amount of member’s reading engagement or they have earned less if they have less member’s engagement.

Well, member's reading engagement isn’t something that you can really control but all you can do is to make sure that your content is more interesting for the readers so that they actually spent some amount of their time on it rather than just ditching it after a few seconds.