10% Of Medium Writers Make 90% Of The Dollars That Medium Pays Out
A Sobering Power Law Analysis Of Medium Payouts
Let me preface this by saying that I had to make a lot of assumptions. Medium provides very little data on the distribution of writer pay so I had to make a lot of guesses. But I do think that this analysis is at least directionally correct.
Many things in life follow a power law distribution (which looks like the plot below). A familiar example of a power law is the 80–20 rule — that goes something like 20% of shoppers account for 80% of spending. So a power law implies an unequal distribution. That vertical part of the red line (on the left of the plot) means that most people make zero or close to zero while the horizontal part of the red line means that a few people make a ton of money.
Global wealth is distributed in this way. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the guy who bought Shiba Inu coins own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world. I don’t think it’s far fetched to hypothesize that Medium earnings are distributed the same way. A handful of top writers likely earn as much or more per month than the bottom half of…
