Why Are We So Entertained (and Incensed) at Top Medium Earnings Stories?

Do you really want to know what your co-workers make?

I recently came across a story on Medium where one writer had some harsh criticism of a top Medium writer’s income story. You know the ones. You see them all over Medium. You can’t get away from them. It’s usually a headline sounding something like this:

How I Made $X This Month on Medium

The amount of dollars presented in the headline is staggering to the other 99% of Medium writers who make a small fraction of that amount. So when we see these headlines, we can’t help ourselves. We click on their article, hoping to glean some hint of some secret as to how we can do the same.

These stories are particularly powerful at the beginning of your journey on this platform when you are hungry for all the information you can get on finding success.

And yet, these stories don’t hold a pull on us forever. Eventually, you grow bored with them. You quickly learn articles with headlines like that are never going to tell you the secret to getting there yourself. It’s not that the writer is holding back or wants to hold onto their knowledge to keep you from succeeding.

It’s because they don’t know how it happened either.

Yes, they write every day. Yes, they work hard. Yes, they match their topics with interest from their audience. Yes, they follow curation guidelines. You probably do all those things too. But there is something about this writer. Their voice, their style, some innate talent, or dumb luck that has driven them to the top, and every article they publish is smiled upon by the Medium gods above. And they are bestowed with thousands of readers.

So now they want to write about their success. They can’t help themselves. They know we’ll read it. It will contribute to even more success. They try to sound humble. They tell us we can do this too if we’d only work hard enough. If only we put in the same kind of work that they did. If only we’re good enough.

Some may feel inspired, but for others, it’s a difficult line to hear. Especially if you’ve spent hours, or even days researching your in-depth article. You publish it. It gets a modest amount of views, with a modest amount of earnings. Then, you read someone’s stream-of-conscious blog-style article, and you see they’ve managed to get 10K claps.

They haven’t researched a single thing. They seemingly wrote off the top of their head. You even notice grammar mistakes and typos. And yet, here they are, featured on your front page. It’s always disheartening to see someone that appears to be doing less work make more money than you do. Of course, appearances can be deceiving and none of us know the amount of work they’re putting in behind the scenes. And you can’t deny, they have a knack for entertaining us.

I do have to point out, top earners on Medium are nowhere near top earners on other social media platforms. The top earner on Medium for September was $49,705.40. Assuming that’s a stable monthly income and not a one-off viral sensation, this writer will net close to $600,000 this year.

It seems like a tremendous amount for Medium. And it is. It’s a tremendous amount for anywhere. But over on YouTube, the top earner, Ryan Kaji made $26 million in 2019. If you really want to feel incensed today, then you should know that Ryan is a little kid that started his channel doing toy reviews.

This leads me to the thought that comparing what others are making isn’t the best for mental health.

It isn’t just Medium where people are curious as to what the other guy is making. In a traditional workplace, most co-workers do not talk about their salaries. There is no way to compare if you’re being compensated fairly for your work.

But wouldn’t you like to know?

Two economists from Harvard Business School took a deep dive into how much discomfort we feel at comparing salaries. In their study, they found that people were willing to pay actual money to find out their co-worker's salaries.

The median amount that people were willing to pay was only $13. So generally, they weren’t that curious. However, some were very curious. Some were willing to pay over $1,000 for the information. And yet, as motivated as they were to find out this information, they didn’t bother doing the simple act of asking around. They wanted to know other’s salaries, but they didn’t want anyone to know that they wanted to know, and they didn’t want to reveal their own.

It’s traditionally taboo to talk about earnings or how much money one has in our society. This is part of why these articles baring all about a writer’s income are so enticing to read. Rarely do you get a look that transparent into a person’s financial life. It’s a bit like a titillating sex story, it lures readers in with the promise of an insider’s view into something taboo.

This tight-lipped attitude about salaries may be changing. Millennials, famous for breaking down social barriers, have reportedly started breaking this one down as well. They seem to feel more comfortable than older generations at talking about their salaries. This may partly account for the extreme amount of articles on how much money people make on Medium. And it also may account for some of the severe reactions of the more traditionalists on the perceived boorishness of this behavior.

But talking about money shouldn’t be a bad thing. The more transparent we are about incomes, the higher chance we have of financial equality. If you go into a job knowing what your co-worker makes, you’ll have the confidence to negotiate for a fair salary.

Admittedly, this isn’t what’s going on with Medium. Knowing what the next guy makes won’t help your income an iota here. There’s no negotiating your salary. The income articles feel less like an attempt at income equality and more like humble bragging and an easy way to get reads.

Still, I can’t help but feel, the willingness for some to talk so freely about their earnings might be an indication that it’s also changing in the rest of the world.

If salaries were transparent, wouldn’t the income gap between races and sexes be much harder to maintain? Breaking down taboos and barriers to money will ultimately lead to a better shot for everyone at making a fair wage.

If the greater good for society means my Medium homepage is full of earnings articles, I can deal with it. And I can always choose not to read them.

Yet, while I see the good in being transparent about earnings, I also see why it feels like such bad taste these days.

None of us has the luxury to forget we’re living through a pandemic. People have lost loved ones, they’ve lost jobs, they’ve lost incomes. People are dealing with Covid testing, school closings, medical bills, and food lines. And while we wait for vaccines to save the world, we know some of us won’t make it that long.

The top-earning articles feel a bit different than they used to. And they’re going to garner more criticism than they did in the past. It’s tone-deaf when a writer hasn’t noticed the world has changed around them.