What You Need To Know About Medium’s Key Metric: Member Reading Time
to better understand your (future) earnings
The ‘member reading time’ is the key metric when it comes to earnings.
Medium members with a follower base of 100+ are paid based on this crucial metric.
Still, many (new) writers don’t know how the ‘reading time’ gets calculated and what’s the difference to ‘read time’.
In the early days of my writing journey, I was overwhelmed and confused too.
In this article, I will explain my insights to you — in order to save you a lot of time.
Read time
According to Medium’s calculation, readers are able to read 265 words in 1 minute.
That’s how they calculate the ‘read time’ on Medium.
This means when you write a 5x 265-words piece, there’s a marker on your preview saying, for instance, it’s a 5 min read (as below).
Images count as well
When you add images to your text, Medium is counting image #1 as 12 seconds, 11 seconds for image #2, and so on.
You may wonder: What’s the difference between ‘read time’ and ‘reading time’ then?
Reading time
For the ‘read time’ alone you won’t get paid.
You’re not a (freelance) writer submitting a piece to a newspaper and getting paid based on word count.
You’re writing on Medium. Here you get paid for member engagement = ‘reading time’.
The reading time means ‘the average amount of time all readers spent reading your story’.
As far as my above-mentioned 5 min read article is concerned, I’ve received an average reading time of 4 min 42 sec:
How you can check the ‘reading time’ of your article:
- Click on your profile picture
- Choose ‘Stats’
- Click on ‘Details’ for the article you’re interested in
- et voilà! You can see views, earnings, and average reading time on your story stats page.
Reading time & earnings
Here are the key facts about the calculation of the earnings in the Medium Partner Program:
- The more minutes paying members actively spend reading your article, the more money you earn
- Scrolling activity, gaps in time, coffee breaks are taken into account.
- Medium will also pay you for reading time from non-members if they become members within 30 days of reading your story. That’s why I recommend at least to twitter your story in order to get more eyeballs on your stories.
Your Takeaways
The ‘member reading time’ is the key metric when it comes to earnings on Medium. It’s smart to know at least a bit about this important metric.
By reading this article you’ve educated yourself, which is awesome.
Check your stats and take a look at your ‘average reading time’ to better understand how your article is performing and why or why not you get paid for it.
Keep in mind: the difference between ‘read time’ and ‘reading time’ is that you only get paid for the latter.
Therefore it’s crucial to…
- find ways to keep your reader’s attention.
- spice up your formatting in order to make your article easy to digest and to scan.
Tell me about your thoughts in the comments!
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