Why I’m Feeling Disheartened As a Medium Writer
Spoiler Alert: Yes, it’s because I’m not making much income from my writing on Medium.
I started writing on Medium shortly before the pandemic, intrigued by the platform and its promises of writerly visibility and income. As someone who once blogged on a Blogspot website where there was no monetization of my writing, Medium offered the promise of more readers and income.
I have been lured by the promise of Medium to promote my stories algorithmically, help my writing gain exposure and traction, and help me organically build an audience interested in my writing.
My successes have been meager. Yet I’ve had a few. What’s been frustrating is that I’ve been working to shift my focus toward healing and transformation, focusing on personal and spiritual growth, but it is my articles on dating that have gained the most attention and income. Does this relate to how so many men in our society need a spiritual awakening? I believe so.
But alas, even my successes have been meager. During my highest-earning months, I have still only earned $67 and change per month in US dollars. My most viral article had almost 3k viewers, and it was largely because it went viral in the manosphere of Medium.
I only earned USD 5.24 for the month of November 2022. Admittedly, I’ve been less active on Medium lately, as I’ve been frustrated by the low pay and low visibility of most of my articles.
The most I earned in a month was $61.70, which was in May 2022. Two successive months of earning around USD 61 wasn’t so bad, and I tried, for a period, to keep up — and grow — the momentum. I didn’t quite manage, but I managed to make over $10/month for four months at least. Still, of course, I’m saddened and frustrated not to have yet earned even $100 in a month.
My highest-earning article has earned me a little over USD 87 to date, and it was Why Is It So Hard for Men to Do the Bare Minimum?
A follow-up article, Why Do I Trigger Men When I Demand Respect as a Woman?, earned me only a portion of that: USD 27.11 to date. Still, my writing finally gained traction, and my page garnered a following.
Yet the nominal payments have been discouraging, to say the least. I know if I showed more discipline and regularly wrote, if I published to more curated pages, if only… I acknowledge that work takes work, yet I’m left with the feeling that my writerly efforts would be better valued elsewhere.
With the precariousness of the longevity of Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, heavy in many people’s minds, I’ve started receiving a growing influx of notifications of users writing on Substack. I haven’t checked out that platform yet, but that and other options seem increasingly attractive. At the same time, my experience with Medium has reminded me of how hard it is to make it as a freelance writer. If capitalism is exploitative (it is), then the gig economy is doubly so (it is).
I’ve written so many pieces about how, under the way our patriarchal capitalist system functions, women’s labor and energy are inherently devalued more than men’s. You know that trend where people talk about things that seem like scams that aren’t, or that are scams but are just societally accepted? While these are not technically scams, capitalism, and dating under capitalism definitely seem like scams to me. Having to produce labor in the gig economy during a period of insanely high cost of living seems like a scam. And yet.
We must continue to put ourselves out there in the world. We must labor and hopefully find the labor in ways that are meaningful and financially rewarding us. We must continue to seek out healing and conscious relationships. So I will persevere with my writing, but I will take this as a sign that I also need to diversify my writing work outside of Medium.
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