My First Year On Medium
Exploring a surprisingly high curation rate
When I joined Medium in early 2019, it’s safe to say I didn’t really know much about the platform. I had ideas I wanted to share that were simply too long for conventional social media, and thought that this was essentially all Medium was good for.
It wasn’t long before I learned about the Partner Program, so I joined that too. Imagine my delight when I received an email telling me that my first article, because of its quality, had be curated! Surely it was time to pack in my job — I was going viral!
It didn’t quite work out like that, of course. But I was really happy to see that over 200 people had read my work, especially as I didn’t have a single follower at the time. (I also made $2.50, which isn’t to be knocked).
As the months went by, I got more emails and finished the year with an 85% curation rate. That sounds impressive until I point out I only published 13 stories.
I think one of the reasons for the high percentage of curations is the amount of time and effort I put into each article — too much, if I’m honest. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first ‘failure’ came when I increased my output from one to five articles in a month — perhaps they weren’t quite as polished.
