Member-only story
January Earnings Are In & It’s Not Pretty
Along with my latest theory on what’s going on
I’ve done monthly earnings reports recently, and thought you’d be interested to know what happened in January. This month’s pay fell to zero on some stories published after 6th January. Others earned at a very low rate — just a few cents. Fortunately, I’d got a little nest egg of earnings before the fall, before the disappointment kicked in.
Medium CEO Coach Tony said that Medium Meta stories were deliberately low and would stay low, which makes it ironic that the only stories that earned more than 9 cents after 7th January were Medium meta stories. My best performing story and biggest earner for the month was a Medium meta story.
It earned a whopping $4.81. The rest of my top earners for January were published before 6th January, and continue to earn at higher rates, but they don’t get a lot of reads after the initial publishing date.
My latest story published a few days ago has earned about half a cent per read, accruing a massive 8 cents for 14 reads. It’s not a meta story, so arguably, it should be paid at a higher rate based on Medium’s latest official change to punish Medium meta writing.
But if you look at the stats, you can see that the Medium meta stories are actually being paid at a higher rate per read than the non-meta stories. What a joke.
My views and reads were respectable, considering I stopped publishing regularly, as there didn’t seem to be much point publishing so often if I would not be paid.
My best story in January is still sitting pretty at zero earnings for the month, despite being featured by the editor and nominated for boost. It has registered 6 member reads. It had another comment on it this morning, so I wonder if it will have earned one cent by tomorrow morning. We’ll see.
