Medium: How Long to Get to $1000?

Short Answer: Depends. Here’s the long answer . . .

Shaunta Grimes
The Write Brain
Published in
6 min readJul 12, 2019

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This is going to be kind of a long answer to a short question.

There is no easy (or ethical) way for me to say that you can get to a decent part-time income on Medium within a certain amount of time, because so much of it depends on things like:

  • How much experience do you have as a writer?
  • How much time are you willing to put into it?
  • How many times will you write per week?
  • Do you already have an audience you can drive to your posts?
  • Are you willing to put the time into learning how to use Medium effectively?

But I’m going to do my best to give you some kind of an idea.

The most important metric on Medium is ‘fans.’

Fans are the unique number of paying Medium members who clap for your post. (Similar to liking on other social media platforms.) Those members have paid $5 per month to Medium and Medium distributes their $5 to the writers they clap for.

The number of views or reads or claps means close to nothing outside of vanity metrics.

I average 175 to 200 fans per day, which results in an income that averages just under $1000 per week.

That’s good news, because it means that you don’t have to have thousands of fans to earn a full-time income on Medium. Getting to about $1000 per month on Medium requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 75 fans per day.

If you stay focused on that metric, you’ll be able to measure how close you’re getting to your goal.

Here are my current 30 day stats:

According to the info that Medium sends to Partnership members every month, only 7 percent of ALL Medium writers earn more than $100. Only a little more than half of all Partnership members write at least one post in any month.

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Shaunta Grimes
The Write Brain

Learn. Write. Repeat. Visit me at ninjawriters.org. Reach me at shauntagrimes@gmail.com. (My posts may contain affiliate links!)