Yearning to get a grip on earnings?

I care about getting read. Here’s how I take control.

I joined Medium because I loved writing and because Medium would find me an audience without having to invest heavily into social media and other channels to promote my content. And I could even earn money as an added bonus! So… Maybe I should check on how I am doing.

I use a couple of tools to easily analyze my growth on the platform. Those tools are available for you too.

My earnings

I started writing about half a year ago. When I joined, I figured it would be nice to maybe earn back my subscription. I actually do a little better than that.

Best performing stories

As you can see, my best performing stories are about the extensions I write.

Don’t get me wrong, coding is a lot of fun, but these results make me kinda sad. I much rather had my other stories perform better. Still, I am happy that at least one of my other stories made it into the top 10.

I almost made a cup of coffee from a story about classical music.

When I dive a little deeper into the story, I notice that it is still doing well. I get a view every now, although I am not earning any cookies to go with the coffee.

The first 25 days, the story earned a few cents a day. After 3 months, it is still getting views every day or two. No money, though.

After I noticed this, I added a referral link to the story. Apparently, folks outside of Medium are interested.

My worst stories

Ouch, it’s hard to expose my failure here, but here goes: my list of underperforming stories in terms of earnings:

Remind me to never to sort like this again. I have expanded the two stories in the screenshot above. I am really fond of those. I consider both stories about games (the retro AI shooter Zanac and the emotional rollercoaster The First Tree) to be small gems, even though I must admit my writing skill has evolved quite a bit since then. They are a few of my earliest stories, after all.

Looking at this, is should probably look into republishing them on Medium, or maybe even somewhere else.

My distributed stories

Overall, I found that looking at the earnings from this table is very insightful.

As I said: I joined Medium to find me my audience. I figure the best way to analyze this, is by looking at stories that are Chosen for further Distribution.

I have too little data on it to draw any definitive conclusions. One hypothesis I have, however, is that writing about Eurovision yields a lot of views. Just don’t expect to earn anything with it, as most views are external (324 external versus 22 internal).

Or maybe I have been a victim of some weird bot.

Medium Earnings Extension

The screenshots I show in this story are from my newest extension Medium Earnings. Currently I am waiting for feedback from beta-users before I publish it.

I plan to release the extension sometime this week. I will probably publish about it first at What’s up? M. And sometime later right here in Feedium.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta-tester and enjoy early releases, check out this story.

Diving deeper into your stats

If you want to dive a bit deeper into your stats, I suggest you check out the following extensions:

The story is quite lengthy and doesn’t do the wonderful extension a lot of justice. If you prefer, check it out in the Google Webstore.

Medium Enhanced Stats is awesome as well. It is not compatible with NextGenStats, but I have them both installed nonetheless. I don’t mind disabling one and then enabling the other. Direct link to the webstore.

As I publish updates to my extension quite frequently, I decided to create a story with all stories about Medium Distribution Info at a glance.

• Want to see which of your stories are Chosen for further distribution?
• Want to download your stats?
• Want to know if a story by another author is Chosen for further distribution?
• Want a glimpse into how Medium might distribute your story?
• Want to take a deep dive into a detailed analysis of your distributed stories?

My extension covers you on all the above questions. Seeing that a story has become distributed really gets a smile on my face everytime. I love it that I don’t have to open up the stats page to know this:

As I use both Medium Enhanced Stats as well as Medium Next Generation Stats, I made sure that the extension is compatible with both of them.

The popcorn-release (3.0.1) is available for download. A shiny new 4.x will be released sometime soon.

Quite a few people remarked that they love how they can see how a story by someone else has been distributed. Just take a glance at the screenshot above.

I like one of the more recent features a bit better: which topics does Medium automatically apply to your stories? Now there’s food for thought!

Closing thoughts

Medium does not disclose a lot of information regarding Distribution or earnings. These tools, however, allow you to draw your own conclusions on better data than they provide you with on the stats-pages.

Your conclusions may be wrong. I have debunked a couple of hypotheses of my own myself.

Still, I find that looking at your stats, when you’re experiencing a creative (writer’s) block, is a better way to spend time on your writing than looking at a blinking cursor on a blank screen.

I know that I have shamelessly promoted some of my own work in this story, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. I hope to see you soon as a user of any of the extensions I mentioned, or to welcome you as a beta-tester.

Thank you for reading. For now: go back to writing and earn yourself some coffee money!