Why You Won’t Make A Living From Medium
The gurus pretending that you can are liars
Tim Denning, Zulie Rane, Ayodeji Awosika and Sinem Günel have one thing in common. They are all extremely successful on Medium AND trying to sell you on the idea that you can make a living from Medium.
While this certainly is possible because they were all able to do it, not everyone is going to make a living from Medium and I am fed up with this American dream kind of narrative that you only need to work hard enough to make it happen.
Being a good writer doesn’t necessarily yield results in terms of monetary value.
Still, there is one writer specifically who keeps on stressing that ANYONE can make money on Medium, as long as you are a good writer and are dedicated to writing.
And to that I say: Liar!
Working hard isn’t the key to success.
As much as it’s good to have a “you can reach anything you want” mentality and make others believe that they can make a steady income from Medium — just like they did — that’s not true.
There is no rule book that you can follow.
Some writers promote their work 24/7 and don’t get the same exposure somebody else gets who doesn’t promote their writing.
Some writers publish 5x a week on Medium and don’t get the same amount of traffic and reads someone else gets who only publishes 3x a week.
Some people still earn money from articles they wrote 4 months ago, while others experience a kind of death of their articles one week after they had published them.
You don’t even have to be an amazing writer to make decent money on this platform. Some people are successful on Medium even though they are bad or mediocre writers.
This all goes on to show that the narrative about success being tied to your writing output and writing quality isn’t true. Because the facts don’t add up!
Whether you make it on Medium or not also seems to be a matter of luck.
To quote my fellow writer and friend Amber Carlson:
“Being successful on Medium isn’t only about your talent or how hard you work. It’s also a matter of sheer luck. Each curated piece is like a lottery ticket, it could do spectacularly well and make you a bunch of money, or it could flop. And it’s true that the more work you put out, and the more followers you have, the more likely you are to find those winning lottery tickets. But still, every piece is a gamble, and the amount of success you have is not necessarily proportional to the amount of work you put in.”
Writing gurus are lying to us.
In one of her YouTube videos, Zulie Rane said that you’re doing something wrong if you haven’t seen success on Medium so far. Perhaps your writing isn’t good or you are violating Medium’s curation guidelines.
I know that she’s only trying to be helpful and get others to reach the same success she is having by making others apply her principles and methods but the truth is you can publish good work and publish often and you still won’t get into the 100$ a month club.
Zulie Rane keeps pretending as though everyone could earn the big bucks, when in fact only 1% of all Medium writers earn 1000$ or more from writing on the platform.
If everyone earned at least 1000$, she wouldn’t make 3000$ anymore. Sinem Günel wouldn’t earn 7000$, etc.
So don’t sell me on the idea that there are 10 cakes when there is 1 cake only. And the bigger your slice, the smaller mine is gonna be. That’s just simple maths.
Before any Zulie Rane fans come for me, I will say this: Zulie isn’t responsible for my failure. She didn’t make me not succeed in any way. However, I think she should be more transparent with her readers and viewers.
Instead of having this happy-go-lucky “you can conquer the world with your writing” attitude, we’d all benefit from a little more transparency.
It might be a slap in the face but I’d rather have someone tell me upfront that Medium is a really harsh and draining game with a couple of winners only.
I don’t like the “you will see success eventually” approach because it makes writers hold on to a dream that is far from realistic. And instead of spending my time beating a dead horse because I keep hearing and hearing that you just have to stick it out, I could be socializing or doing other things that may not be productive but that make me happy.
Again, I don’t blame any top writers for my obsession with and addiction to Medium. It all comes down to my inability to balance my work and personal life. Nonetheless, I would probably feel less guilty for not writing Medium articles in every minute of my spare time if I was surrounded by writers that told me the truth.
The reality that I believe to be true is that Medium isn’t for everyone. None of it is passive and you are more likely to fail on here than you are to succeed. (Of course, you are welcome to challenge me here.)
Top writer privileges are real.
What I find unfair is that writers like Zulie Rane don’t have to play by the rules that were set out for us. They simply don’t apply to her.
She publishes 3x a week and has enormous success. Why don’t people who publish 5x a week see the same success?
Why do we need to spend a huge amount of time engaging with others, promoting our work, reading articles we don’t even want to read in Facebook groups, while she can completely focus on her writing and only read other people’s work when she wants to?
Not having to spend a huge amount of time promoting her work means that she has more time for writing and crafting genius articles.
We are all in here for the money.
I have often heard that you need to love writing and can’t be all about money if you write on Medium. There’s some truth in that but it’s not the whole story.
I think we are all here for the money. If we couldn’t earn any money from Medium, the number of writers who strive to publish daily or every other day would be cut in half. Maybe the half of the half would be cut in half.
We all want some recognition for our writing. We all dream of making writing our career. And we aren’t bad people for wanting that.
Zulie and Sinem Günel started writing on here when the Medium Partner Program was long put in place. I doubt they’d be pushing out content consistently if they knew that they couldn’t make a penny of it.
So don’t tell me that I need to be here because of my love for writing and that any intention to make money of my writing will somehow worsen or lessen my writing.
I love writing and I like money and I want to make money from writing. It’s as simple as that.
Sometimes I believe that Zulie isn’t lying to her audience. Success came easy to her (she made 500$ in her second month on Medium already, which is incredibly rare) so she might not understand that it takes more than good and consistent writing to get big on Medium.
Final thoughts
Even though it seems that I am talking shit about Medium, I still appreciate this amazing platform. You can search the whole web and you won’t be able to find a website that even compares to what Medium is offering.
Medium offers an already existing audience and allows us access to great voices and ideas. We can improve our writing and create a personal brand. For some, Medium even presents a new way to attract clients for writing projects, which is amazing!
But not every writer will be able to have these achievements and maybe it’s about time top writers stop pretending that making a living through Medium is possible for everyone. It’s also a matter of sheer luck, which is why I am pissed when people pretend that you just gotta work hard enough to see success.
It ain’t as easy as writing gurus make it out to be. It is incredibly hard to be seen, create quality content on a daily basis and grow a loyal audience that is interested in what you want to say.
We all want a piece of that delicious cake top writers have been feasting on for months and yet, Medium will never guarantee you that you will sit at the table and be part of this exclusive club.
Our task is to come to terms with that.
Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that I might never be able to turn Medium into a full-time gig and that is okay. I just demand that other writers stop lying to us.
Because it makes us lie to ourselves.
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