This is Why Writers Are Making Less On Medium Lately (Probably)
And why it will probably just be temporary
If you’ve been active on Medium.com, you’ve probably experienced a bit of an earnings dip in the last few months. I’ve read a few articles on theories why, and I think they’re somewhat close to hitting the mark.
Yes, the coronavirus is likely to blame.
But it gets a bit more interesting to see why that might be the case. And I have to thank Neil Patel for showing a possible reason.
For those that want a quick summary of my thoughts, I put a TLDR at the bottom.
Audience behavior
Have you ever wondered what the audience's behavior is like on Medium? It’s always been something I’ve been keen to understand, but it’s not easy to come by.
Sure, there are highly paid services that try to analyze such statistics (like Alexa.com), but I never quite felt like going down that rabbit hole myself due to the cost and lack of use I could get out of it.
But, if you haven’t heard of Neil Patel, he’s an extremely prolific blogger that niches in blog marketing. In addition to the hundreds (maybe even thousands) of really useful posts on the topic, he also created an SEO research tool called Uber Suggest.
If you’re curious, you can go to his website and see a free tool for analyzing other websites.
Typing in ‘Medium.com’ for example, shows you this:
If you have your own blog with a decent amount of visitors, tools like this can better help you understand the analytics aspect of it.
But back to the topic of Medium.
Medium’s audience
According to some of these sites, there’s upwards of 150 million views of the platform every month.
As for writers, Emma Smith wrote in the Medium blog that in 2017 they paid out $6 million to over 30,000 writers. And one year ago (weirdly today, actually), this blog stated a source at Medium said they had between 200 to 400,000 writers on the platform.
I personally estimate there’s somewhere between 400,000 to 1,000,000 by now. Especially with the lockdowns being experienced in so many of Medium’s audience’s country.
Why did the lockdown affect Medium’s earnings?
Again, these are just my thoughts, but a lot of this idea revolves around this picture from Neil’s blog post a while ago:
More specifically, it refers to the red rectangle at the far right. The browsing location for many readers is at work.
Why’s that? Shirking.
I used to do it a bit myself if I’m to be honest. People at work can’t freely watch Netflix or Youtube videos. They can’t play video games on their computer or go through Kim Kardashian’s Instagram all day long.
A lot of people work in open offices. A lot of office networks have restrictions on what can be viewed. In short, people can shirk at work (t-shirt coming soon) with stuff that looks like research/general writing much easier than they can with other forms of media.
But now that many of the audience is in lockdown, they don’t need to shirk anymore. Your boss is on the other side of the city, he won’t notice if you’re watching The Ozarks on Netflix in between work calls.
But there’s also one other reason I suspect has messed with earnings.
Writers on Medium
I’ve noticed certain older articles of mine have a lot more traffic recently. I’ve also been watching other popular stories on Medium over the months since the lockdown started. There was a common factor in many of them.
People want to supplement their income now that they’re at home.
And we all know that Medium provides a juicy opportunity for that. Get paid for writing a blog? Sign me up!
(Note: I did, in fact, sign up.)
That’s why I suspect there’s many more than ‘just’ 200–400,000 writers on the platform now. And if that’s true, the ‘supply’ of blog posts will have gone way up with it.
So if we combine the above 2 theories — and I believe there is some merit in them — we get a nasty combo for earning on the platform.
Way more writers, with way less reading time at offices.
If that’s true, then it makes sense that some author’s earnings have dropped in half over these months, if not more. We simply have more competition with fewer readers.
Have hope!
The good news? As the world slowly opens back up, it’s presumable that workers will inevitably go back to their desks. And as none of us are robots, we do need the occasional break from talking to Jerry the Ops manager about the rising risk of a shortage in paper cups for the water cooler.
So, as with any side hustle, especially one in blogging — the people that consistently produce high-quality content while not giving up on the hobby will eventually gain some success.
This is a rough time for people all over the world, but we’ll get through it. Humans are a formidable beast.
So keep the chin up and your fingers down on the keyboard!
TLDR
For those without the patience for my ramblings, here’s the quick version:
- There’s evidence that a lot of the reading time on Medium is from office workers
- Since there’s a lockdown in many Medium-audience countries, we have way less office workers reading material
- With the lockdown, a lot of people have found they have more free time on their hands — and many of them have looked for side hustles to do — like Medium.
- So we have a large increase in writers, with a big decrease in reading time at offices
- More competition, less reading, less money per article for everyone.
- As people go back to work when places open up, earnings should (hopefully) go back up too
Thanks for reading, stay safe everyone!
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