It doesn’t pay (literally) to write technical pieces

But I still write them anyway

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

Being in a technical field (specifically Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning), a good proportion of my writings revolve around specific technical subjects that only readers who belong in the same (or related) industry would understand. Naturally, these technical pieces tend to draw significantly less views and a lower read ratio overall due to the very niche technical subject area.

The risk-to-reward sometimes doesn’t seem worth it because…

1. Technical pieces require a lot of research and fact-checking — The last thing you want to do is to publish an article with false information. Not only are you teaching yourself the wrong thing, but also teaching your audience the wrong things. Fact-checking and researching is thus extremely time-consuming as compared to other articles like opinion pieces.
2. User engagement is extremely tough — As with every content-creation platform, there exists a metric that creators look at to see if a user clicks away while watching a video, swipes down before the video ends and in the case of Medium, clicks away before the article is finished. That coveted metric is read ratio. It tells the author what proportion of readers who are reading his/her article…