Walter Rhein Articles in January Featured All-Time Views

Unfortunately, high views don’t always translate to high earnings

For most of January I was sitting at around 200k views for the month. This was due to two articles that generated more attention than I expected.

I think the reason the articles took off is because they seem to have been featured on Flipboard. I don’t know how they got featured there and I don’t know how to replicate the attention.

It would be a nice code to crack, except that it doesn’t drive internal views to your stories. Still, it would work great for anyone who uses Vocal.Media, because they pay based on views regardless of where they come from. My views for the month would have netted me $1,200.

Medium lagged behind that, but I still did well for the month. My main complaint was that neither of my two stories was chosen as a finalist for the Vocal+ Fiction Awards. They picked 1,000 runners up, and I have a hard time believing my stories weren’t in the top 1,000 of all that they received.

I’m beginning to suspect that the external views you get from Vocal get your challenge entries elevated or disqualified without any regard to the quality of your writing (again, pure speculation on my part).

Anyway, here’s the list of articles for January of 2022 along with some brief comments:

January 2022 article list

32k views for this one, most of them external. It’s been a decent earner and generated some good comments.

This one is from my Writing Cooperative column.

Last month’s recap.

For those of you who don’t know, the Medium Creator’s Hub does a writing prompt every week. All you have to do is publish a story with #writehere and they promote it for you.

I like to submit to AfroSapiophile. They don’t expect me to pull my punches, in fact, they prefer it when I don’t.

See above.

This one kind of got lost in the mix, but it’s a solid piece.

My column for Writing Cooperative again. I’ve been reading the old Dragonlance books to my kids. Boy…they’re hard to revisit.

This one has gotten some decent traffic. I think the whole government needs to wake up a little bit and recognize the threat Trump represents to our freedoms.

This one is a response to some of Trump’s statements about loyalty.

With the Olympics coming up, this one is more relevant. It’s kind of hard to watch the media celebrate rich white kids who have nothing else to do but go skiing every day.

This was another one for the Creator’s prompt. It performed well.

I got some unexpected blowback from this one including somebody who wrote a whole article about how she disagreed with me.

156k views for this one and I have no idea why. Maybe it was because I updated the SEO text? I found this one Flipboard too.

Based on my good looks, I believe this assertion to be true.

The MLK quote that nobody remembers is the one where he points the fingers at the moderates.

A humor piece. It had been a heavy month.

Everybody is lying about inflation.

It takes a long time to unpack all the lies we’re told about our country.

I thought this one was funny, but some people think it’s creepy

The idea that the centrists have an obligation to ensure “progress is slow” isn’t helping.

I spent way too much time arguing with somebody who had a very weird take on one of my articles. I eventually blocked her.

I don’t get why Trump, in his delusional attacks on elections, hasn’t mentioned this more often. It would actually give him a bit of credibility (not that I want him to have credibility, but I want the DNC to be held accountable).

A memory popped into my mind I had to write about.

The future we’re approaching.

Ron Johnson is the worst.

I found an active cross-country skiing group on Facebook so I posted this for them to enjoy.

The Writing Cooperative.

The Republicans are making a lot of noise… I don’t know why the Democrats aren’t listening.

Another piece from another random memory.

That’s it for January. I’m also in a couple vocal contests, so these stories need views (you don’t have to read them, just open them in a tab and scroll down to the end):

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