Trying to Understand Medium Pay Rates — Is It Me, or Are They Falling?
Let’s dive into the stats…
Payment is based on member reading time, so let’s take a look at these stats and see what I’ve been paid for different read times…
My best performing story this month is this one, which has earned $30.84 to date. It’s accrued 16 hours and 46 minutes of reading time.
Now let’s compare it to this story, below, which has earned $1208.53 to date for 270 hours and 53 minutes reading time.
Members spent 16 times as long reading the second story, so I earned well from it. But 16 times $30.84 is $493, which means that even if the other stories accrued the same read time, I’d only earn $493 for it — compared to $1208.
The first story has earned less than half the amount per minute of read time than the second story. That’s surprising.
I know Medium pays us by splitting the membership fee, so the rate varies widely, but I’m surprised that it varies this much on similar stories by the same writer.
The first story was published on 4th March this year, but the better earning story was published in July 2022. I do wonder if members are reading a lot more now (due to cold weather) than they were in July, so writers get a smaller split of the fee for every minute of reading time in the winter. The weather’s rubbish now. It was hot and sunny in July. Could that explain the discrepancy?
Perhaps that’s a significant factor, but obviously it’s a bit disappointing trying to work out why topics that once did so well, seem to be dying, and why the reward is proportionally so much lower. Perhaps members have had enough of these kinds of stories. But that doesn’t explain the discrepancies between the rates.
Let’s take a look at another one. This story, below, accrued 182 hours, 15 minutes of read time and earned $550.64.
Members spent 11 times longer reading this story than my one at the top of this article. 11 times $30.84 (this month’s top earner) is $339, so again, it appears that a higher rate has been applied to the Greta story, published last November. The weather’s still rubbish, but November wasn’t exactly the height of summer either.
This basically means it’s impossible to get any sense of what you might earn from a story, because not only is the read time unpredictable, but even if you get a good read time, the rate applied per minute of read time is also unpredictable… and it appears to be falling!
What do you think is going on? Does the rate per minute improve when a story starts to take off? Why would that be?
Key Message: It’s virtually impossible to predict what your Medium earnings might be on any story!
© Susie Kearley 2023. All Rights Reserved.
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