Why Medium Gave Me A $50 Bonus

I couldn’t be more astonished to have seen the following notification on my Member Partner Program (MPP) page when I went to my dashboard, to check out my May 2021 earnings!

For “the most member reads, claps, and follows” in April 2021, Medium gave 1,000 lucky writers a bonus of $500 USD. While I didn’t get that bonus, under new terms for May 2021, gratefully, I did receive a bonus.

I was one of those who said that Medium should consider paying more writers, maybe with less than $500. $500 USD is a heck of a lot to some of us.

Those with lots of reads would already be earning good money under the MPP, so a bonus of $500 would ramp up their earnings big-time. Good for them.

But what about those loyal to Medium in terms of being a paying member for months or years, and publishing and marketing as many stories as they can? Not everyone has the time to publish every day or writes for high earning niches.

Having joined Medium in Nov 2018 I aimed to publish 3 to 5 stories a week, every week, with what I call one “major” story a month. 😄A “major” story is on a topic which you feel will garner a high reader engagement. I understand that getting paid on Medium is a long-term game.

I am happy and grateful that Medium is now paying bonuses to 2,000 people. Based upon the email above, I interpret “a top Partner Program writer” to mean someone within the top 2,000 earners for a month.

It doesn’t mean that if you allocated as a “Top Writer” by the Medium programme, then you fall into the esteemed top 2,000.

I fell into the 1,500 to 2,000th percentile.

Now, if you go by “top writer in the MPP” in terms of earnings, well, in May 2021 I earned under my own steam, $71 USD. This compares to my earnings in April 2021 of $61 USD.

It is logical to me that the more you inch toward $100 in monthly earnings, the more the possibility of getting into one of the tiers.

I say this knowing that it’s likely that around only 5 to 7% of all writers on Medium make $100 USD or more, in any month. How do I know this? Well, the email newsletter for MPP members used to contain stats of pay-outs.

This info was on the 3-Minute Blog also, with the last one being for May 2020. However, sometime in 2020, Medium stopped reporting on its pay-outs.

Nobody knows how many active writers there are on Medium, but if only 7% in a month make $100 USD or more, then 93% earn less than $100 a month. Because I earned $71 for May and was one of the top 1,500 to 2,000th earners, that means that 1,500 writers earned x amount at least.

Of course, the x is dependent upon the range of earnings of those who received the $50 bonus. X is the highest earnings of someone in Tier 3. The top 1,500 earned more than X, so if I knew what X was, I could aim for my next month’s earnings to reach more than X.

If my monthly earnings drops to below $70 USD, I will see if I still fall into Tier 3 or not.

Above are the statistics for my stories in April and May 2021.

If you go by the terms or conditions used by Medium for the inaugural bonuses for April’s stories~~being number of reads, claps, and follows, you can deduce that 1,000 other writers scored more Reads / Claps / Followers than what my stats show for April.

I stand by my case that as you inch toward the hallowed hall of Medium fame of being a $100 USD earner or higher, that you will slip toward the 3rd and lowest tier of the new Bonus Scheme~~or higher!

Regarding Followers, if you have your email receipts switched on, under your settings, you get weekly stats for your stories, which include the names of new Followers.

Alternatively, you might tally up your numbers of monthly followers, as you see the Notifications of them on the browser version of Medium.

Be warned that the Emails contain a maximum of 5 recent followers, so if more than 5 followed you in a week, you would only get the exact number of weekly followers by trawling through your Notifications and finding [“ name ] started following you.”

The point of this is Followers are different to Fans.

I am providing all the data in this article in order to review the mechanism of the new Medium Bonus Program.

My goal for 2021 has been to earn $100 USD in a month *under my “own steam” (so, without a Bonus payment). Having said that, I am happy and grateful that my May pay-out was $121 USD, including the Bonus!

I am also now motivated to read / follow / clap a lot more stories of my fellow Medium writers, in order to place the “small fry” into one of the tiers. By the “small fry” I mean those who are not currently earning themselves (and Medium) enough to be one of the esteemed or “fly-by-night” / favoured (depending upon your viewpoint) 2,000.

Because I love reading, writing, learning, and supporting others, I’m sharing my article on the Medium Enhanced Stats add-on or extension for Chrome. You may have noted number of claps in my Table above. Your Medium general Stats page does NOT show the number of Claps. However, a wonderful add-on by Tomas Trajan will display claps!

Thanks for reading. And never give up on receiving a bonus from Medium.

UPDATE: 3 JULY 2021

I started writing about what happened for me relevant to the June 2021 bonus, but when I realised I (as usual) had quite a lot to say, I wrote a separate article about that, LOL. You can click on the link below to go to my update.