What is Medium, Exactly?

Medium can be a bit confusing. I feel your pain.

Medium is a free blogging platform, owned by Twitter, for writers. It’s free to use for blogging, and it is completely ad-free for readers. For $5 a month, you become a Medium member with unlimited reading benefits. Medium will also pay you to write. Many writers have been able to quit their day jobs by writing on Medium.

Intrigued?

Medium, in addition to being a free blogging platform, hosts online publications, which are also known as magazines. Medium writers can publish (just to) Medium — the blogging platform itself, or to a publication hosted on Medium. Bloggers on Medium can start their own publications or submit their stories to be published in one of the magazines.

In 2019 Medium has a monthly readership of more than 240 million worldwide! Wow! That’s a lot of eyeballs.

Medium is a little bit like social media for writers.

People who follow you on Medium will get notifications on their smartphone/email when you publish a new article. If your article is behind the Medium paywall, when readers read and/or clap for your article, you make money. More on the Medium paywall in a bit.

Did I mention, It’s possible to quit your day job by writing on Medium?

Hosted on Medium, for free, is a plethora of publications created by individuals like me. Some of those publications have grown into full-scale businesses in a short period of time. There are also former major paper magazines now hosted on the digital platform of Medium. Every Medium publication has its own followers and mailing list.

You don’t have to publish your writings to a Medium-hosted publication/magazine. You can simply publish to the Medium blogging platform (behind or in front of the Medium paywall). But there are benefits to publishing to a publication. More on that later.

Medium has its own curators. If your story is selected for curation, it is then put into Medium’s “topics” and will be highlighted on that topic’s Medium homepage for a period of time and sent out through email and through smartphone notifications. getting your story in front of a lot of eyeballs.

I like eyeballs. Eyeballs translate to money (which translates to me living in a bikini on a warm beach somewhere else).

Your story can be curated whether or not is also published in a Medium pub/magazine. Did I mention I currently live in Alaska? Imagining living on a warm tropical beach is imperative to my mental health. But I digress…

Your story is findable

• by using the five keywords when you publish,
• from the keywords in your writing,
• from your followers’ notifications to their smartphone or email,
• by sharing your link on social media or elsewhere,
• and your article is also findable through a google search of topics, keywords, and other SEO.

Many articles went viral and made the writers a lot of money when their article hit the first page of Google for certain keywords. This is great if you are writing an informative article where you link in a non-spammy link to your website or book (for example) at the end.

• The benefits of publishing to an independent Medium publication is the added benefit of readers of your writing. There is a lot of power in the crowdsourcing of the other writers promoting their writing on a mutual magazine you both write for. This helps get more readers to the magazine in general, which builds the notification email list and gets more readership to your articles. A lot more. Quit your day job, more.

How the Medium Partner Program works

The Medium Partner Program is what is meant when it is stated that an article is put behind a paywall. Medium makes money through memberships at a price of $5 a month. When members read a story and clap for it, a portion of their membership dollars goes to the writer of the story. This ratio of claps to dollars is unknown. The algorithm just recently changed and is kept secret by Medium so that nobody can “game the system.”

The Medium Partner Program also has in-house “curators” who comb through nearly every published Medium story and select the stories to distribute in its more than 140 topics for its readers. The stories that are curated receive higher rankings on Medium’s home page, in user feeds, in smartphone notifications, and in email digest, which results in more Member Only Content views.

This is where the money magic happens.

How writers get paid on Medium

Stories behind the Medium paywall are eligible to earn money based on members’ engagement and/or read the time. The more a member spends time reading and interacting with your article with shares, highlights, and comments, the more money your article will make.

An added bonus is a few stories that will be picked by the Medium editorial team and will be “featured” on the homepage. Featured Stories receive a professional copy edit, custom artwork, and prominent placement across Medium’s platform and social networks. Many stories are “curated” by Medium and are featured on certain Medium topic pages and shared with readers the topic.

A featured story can generate several thousand dollars without any added social media promotion, whereas a curated story usually makes $100-$250 by itself. If you have your own email list or social media audience to promote your story, that amount can be much higher. Add in affiliate links or a subtle CTA (Call To Action), and you are now generating passive income.

Thousands of writers on Medium choose not to lock their stories behind the Partner Program paywall so everyone can access the content. A writer may choose per article whether or not the article is locked behind the paywall. Writers do this because they don’t want to limit wider access to a particular story. Anybody anywhere can easily read an unlocked story on Medium.

Medium is a community of writers who help each other.

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below, I’m happy to answer your questions. Be sure to sign up for my Blogging Secrets newsletter, to get the latest updates, tips, and tricks, about writing on Medium, and join my Facebook group, Medium Writing Group, to share your latest Medium posts and connect with other writers.

Katherine T. Hoppe is an author, artist, intuitive, and Founder/CEO of Sacred Hologram INC., SuperSuccess4U.com (and countless other niche websites), is the editor of White Rabbit Blogging Secrets, and Remote Viewing Community Magazine: Explore the woo. She writes and illustrates children’s books under the pen name K.T. Hoppe ❤️. She received a few degrees after studying journalism, art, business, and law, and is a part-time Hollywood actress.

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