I Published 80 Short-Form Articles in January — Here Are The Results

The goal was 100, but luckily I had a lot of work at hand.

Daniel Silva

Follow

Published in

Writers’ Blokke

6 min readFeb 20, 2022

--

When I came back to Medium after a one-year hiatus, I came across a challenge Abena Jackson put herself through.

She wrote 400 short-form articles during October.

That’s 13 articles a day, give or take. Seemed a bit too much but still, a good challenge.

I decided to do something similar, so I aimed to publish 100 articles throughout the month of January.

Was only able to publish 80, but was enough to understand a few things.

A Stressful Challenge

Besides my freelance work, launching my own business, and building some extensive articles, writing 100 short-form articles ended up putting way too much stress I was hoping to deal with.

I started writing 3 articles per day. The problem started when I had too much work at hand on some days.

There were some days when I wrote no short-form article at all and that put up some unwanted stress on my shoulders.

It fell less of a side hustle and more as a part-time job.

I Feel It Lacks Quality

Before doing the hiatus, I was enjoying some mild success on medium, netting between $50 to $100 per month.

Though I wasn’t writing as much, I can safely say the quality was superior.

Being a firm believer in quantity over quality (when starting), I was shocked at first when I saw a lower income when compared to my first month of dishing out quality content.

But the truth is that the Medium community seems to enjoy well-structured articles — even if they don’t meet the curation guidelines.

Plus it makes it easier for people to be engaged in the story.

None of the Articles Got Curated

Medium doesn’t assure curation for short-form articles.

I don’t blame them. It would be a pain to review every single 2-minute article that’s published every day.

Nonetheless, it hurts the views. Few got 100 views and even fewer reached the 1000 mark.

Even though I used a top writer tag “short story” — like many others — in all of the articles, the views were just far too slim.

Followers Don’t Cut It

I have 5 times more followers than when I was making almost $100 a month.

Still, views declined, reads declined, reach declined, income declined. Everything came downhill despite having over 1k followers now.

The obligatory 100 followers to be able to profit from the Partner Program seems to make followers almost irrelevant nowadays.

Everyone follows everyone regardless of their content and/or interests.

In turn, the Medium homepage just doesn’t recommend my articles as much as I wanted — that’s what I believe at least.

Tom Kuegler highlighted this flaw in the algorithm even.

It’s Hard to Find Publications

There are publications that accept almost anything, then there are others that are a bit more selective.

Trying to find fitting Publications for short format it’s not that easy, as the biggest ones don’t usually accept articles that don’t meet curation guidelines, and the ones that do, don’t focus on specific thematics.

So most of them were self-published, which didn’t help with the reads as I was unable to reach other audiences besides my followers.

Eventually, I ended up submitting some articles to some publications like Writer’s Blokke, New Writers Welcome, Geek Culture, Two Minute Madness, and The Shortform.

However, the results weren’t satisfying enough for me to put in the effort to find more publications to submit all of the articles.

It Doesn’t Pay Off

Medium pays writers based on how much time Medium members spend while reading your article.

Short-form articles are 2 minutes long, according to the algorithm, but, truth be told, anyone reads faster than what Medium suggests.

Therefore, it is possible for someone to read a short-form in half of that time — or even less. That hurts the reads count, which in turn hurts your income.

As you can see, I got $40.14 for writing 4 times the amount I wrote in the past.

More than half are allocated to a couple of articles, which makes things even worse. If those two were to tank in terms of reads, I would be getting around $10 for 80 articles.

Either way, it was a fair challenge that taught me a lot. And in case you didn’t get the chance to read some of the articles, here’s the list:

Join Medium with my referral link - Daniel Silva

As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…

dcslva.medium.com