Can Anyone Understand How Medium Works?

Same reads and around the same amount of comments but dollars vary, I don’t get it

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

I have been on Medium for a while now, nearly 3 weeks to be precise and I just don’t understand how it works, I see people earning lots of money from posts that do fairly average, and other posts that are amazing don’t get much money.

I have experienced this myself with writing around 50 articles, I am yet to earn $6 or more from a single article although I nearly hit 900 claps and 20 comments on one post.

As I understand, you get paid based on;

• reads
• claps
• comments

These all have to be by Medium partner program members as if someone interacts who isn’t a member you don’t earn anything from it. Also if they are a friend of Medium that should mean an average of 4x more money for their interactions.

Here is one of my posts;

Authors image

How much would you guess I earned? Maybe $10?

Nope I only received $5.14 and I just don’t get It, if this is right it would mean I would need thousands of claps hundreds of reads, and comments to earn me a decent amount.

Here is the proof:

Authors image

I believe I have done everything right to achieve a pop-off post but that doesn’t even mean success, it would take one to give me success but would I even be guaranteed it? At this rate it doesn’t look like as on my best articles I struggle to make the dollars.

Here are the highest earnings blogs I have written:

I see people earning hundreds of dollars a month on Medium, how do they do it as that would mean lots of articles with thousands of reads a day I’m guessing.

Let me show you two of my blogs with pretty similar stats:

Does anyone have any advice or guidance on how Medium works? As for new writers, it sure is difficult to work out!

I’m unsure how I didn’t earn the same amount on these posts, so any advice would be great.

Thank you for reading :)