I hope to see lots more comments here. I despise Medium's lack of transparency and think this is a great idea.

I wrote on Medium from Aug 2020 to Aug 2021. For a while it was ideal because I was also homeschooling and could only write in 5- or 10-minute chunks, and Medium, with its lack of requirements for extensive citations and journalism, lent itself to the time I had available to write.

My payments from views and a couple of the bonuses for that period totaled $950. (I got 2 $100 bonuses and one $50 one, so without those, on views alone, I would have made $700.) That averages to 73 dollars a month (or $54 without the bonuses.)

Once I sold an article to Better Humans for $500 and that helped my bottom line. I wanted to submit more but as far as I can tell they are not paying for empathic tutorials anymore.

I can't tell you how many articles I wrote because I left the platform and didn't want Ev Williams to have some of my more personal work. When I was seriously trying to make money I maxed out at maybe 12-15 articles per month. It was hard to write any faster than that.

I ended with about 1800 followers. My best article ever made $176; most articles made 5-10 (if that). Nearly everything I ever wrote was distributed, but the only time I got any traction was when I was published at PS I Love You. When they were done I really lost it for this platform.

I don't know what succeeds here. I think if you are interested in and write in tech, money, sex, etc., you will do okay. I think if you're a self-improvement bro who lives in some other country as a digital nomad, you'll do super. I find those topics the most boring ones on earth, so they wouldn't be easy for me to write.

I have written entire kids' nonfiction books for $300, so I don't have rancor about the money. But I do not like the way Medium doesn't share any useful info about how it pays or what it is really doing. I find when I'm talking to people IRL, nobody has any idea what Medium is, and it seems hard to translate Medium success into a platform for any other writing you might do. If it's not helping me build a platform for myself (not just for them) and it's really not paying much, there's no reason for me to write here anymore.

Thanks Roz!!

(Oh, and let's not forget I paid $5 a month fees. So take $65 off my gross.)