If you’ve been paying attention, you no doubt have heard about writers earning a full-time living on Medium. You’ve likely also heard that they heyday is over, that you can’t make money on Medium like you used to. Some people have published 50 or 100 pieces or more only make little more than coffee change. What’s going on here? Is Medium worth your time?
Before we get started, I want to tell you about my experiences with Medium. I tried my hand at Medium around 2018-ish. I wrote fairly consistently, but I made a lot of mistakes. After several months, I called it a total loss and went on with my life. In 2023, though, I gave it another go. I learned from my mistakes, and it made all the difference.
After only 2 months of writing, I earned more than $200 a month, and it grew from there. However, I made a sudden departure despite the income. Why? We’ll go over everything so you can make a well-informed decision and learn from my successes and failures.
Table of Contents
What Is Medium?
You’ve likely come across Medium stories and articles in your general internet searches. Authors can write about everything under the sun (except for things that violate their terms of service and rules.) You can write how-to’s, poetry, fiction, current event news, travel guides or any number of other things. There are embedded publications in Medium covering technology, menopause, parenting, humanity, science and many more. If you’ve got something to share with the world, Medium is an excellent platform to be heard.
Who Uses Medium?
You simply have to create an account to start writing on Medium. You don’t have to apply or submit a writing sample. Your credentials aren’t vetted. In fact, they aren’t even required to create an account. You can definitely use a pseudonym. The application takes only a few minutes, and you can have a post up later today if you want.
Medium is used by professionals in all trades, aspiring writers, professional writers, activists, essayists, poets and others. You don’t have to be a good writer, but it certainly is wise to put your best work out into the world. Unless you publish on one of Medium’s publications (which are like independent publishers running underneath the Medium umbrella), you aren’t held to the highest levels for grammar, content and so forth. You simply have to follow Medium’s rules.
How to Make Money From Medium
While many people write to make a statement, promote themselves or achieve other notable goals, most also want to make money on Medium. It’s not unheard of for top Medium writers to make thousands of dollars or more per month on a fairly consistent basis. For the vast majority of writers, though, it can be hard to break more than $25 or $50 in a month.
To make money on Medium, you need to first join their Partner program. There is a nominal fee. Many people think that they’ll recoup the small fee immediately. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of effort even to cover the fee. You don’t need to join the Partner program to write and publish. You just won’t earn money on your writing if you don’t join the program.
Reads, Claps, Highlights and Comments
Now, you won’t make money by publishing your content either. Readers need to see your content, read it AND interact with it in some way. What does this interaction look like? Medium monitors all stories in terms of views and reads. You get paid based on how many claps your work gets. In addition, if a reader highlights your story or leaves a comment, you get a little bit of extra money.
So, how much are we talking here? It all depends. One story may have 50 comments and only fetch a few dollars. Another may have 50 comments and yield $15, $20 or more.
Medium is a crowded place. Your story could get a few organic views, but you will need to spend some time being active in the community if you want to be successful. Medium is a community, after all. Don’t expect to take without giving. This is one of the biggest mistakes I made on my first stab at Medium years ago.
You need to put your name out there to be seen and to encourage clicks. This means you read other stories, and you let those authors and their readers know that you’re there. You clap and highlight and engage. More than that, you build your own small tribe of writers who engage with your work and who you engage with. (Be aware, though, that this can be against Medium’s terms of service if it’s not done right.)
Boosts
If you write something exceptional, there’s a possibility that it will get “boosted.” A Medium editor must recommended your piece for a boost, so you first need to submit your work to one of Medium’s publications. If boosted, Medium will promote your story both on and off of its platform. This increases visibility and dramatically increases revenue.
Two of my stories were boosted within two months of each other. Only one is currently still online. You can read it here. This one story produced about $150 for me within two weeks of publishing it, and it continues to make money today – albeit on a smaller scale. What happened to my second boosted story? I took it down. More about that later.
Now, a boosted story helps your other stories gain visibility as well. It increases your followers, and this can have a compounding effect on your growth as a writer on Medium. You don’t necessarily need to publish daily and constantly find new topics. Instead, you need to write well.
Self-Promotion
While I did just fine making making money on Medium exclusively through engagements and boosts, you can also self-promote your work on social media. If you have a particularly large social media following, you could drive hundreds or thousands of visitors to your stories in a very short period of time. However, the only readers who count from a monetary perspective are those who are Medium members. If you publish a free/no paywall link to your post on Twitter, for example, people can read your work without you earning a dime from clicking the link.
Digital Products
There are pretty firm rules in Medium’s guidelines regarding promoting your various digital products. Your post, for example, can’t be entirely or even mostly self-promotional. You can put a link if it’s relevant and not shamelessly self-promotion. Medium allows you to link to another website, such as your business blog or website. Many writers have a few links in their bio listed at the end of each story. If you’ve published a book, you can contact Medium about including your book links on your Medium profile page.
Some of the most affluent Medium writers make a considerable amount of money on Medium as well as off of their Medium followers through their various links and products. They might link to their personal blog where they sell various products or courses. They may use the traffic that Medium sends to their website to make money from ads.
Affiliate Links
If you don’t have a thriving blog with various digital products, you can still make money in other ways through Medium. Just as Medium lets you include links to your own products and website, it also allows you to incorporate affiliate links into your pieces, Now, your entire post can’t be promotional. You’ll need to use a text link and choose products that are relevant to what you’re writing about. Make sure to read Medium’s terms and rules before adding links to your content.
A Warning About Medium
Medium is very strict about their rules. Aspects of the website are monitored by bots rather than humans. And this can be a huge problem. In March 2024, the bots went a bit crazy and cracked down on what it thought was system manipulation. It stripped profits and the ability to earn money on work going forward from thousands of writers, if not more. For those who were active on the platform, many of the writers who they followed seemingly disappeared.
I was one of these writers. I had more than $100 in my Medium account at that time, and it disappeared. Even after I was allowed to come back on Medium, the money never was returned to me. Like so many others who were blackballed at the time, I thought I was doing everything perfectly. I was making money. I was an active member of the community. I wasn’t doing anything malicious. I was supportive to other writers. So, what happened?
Medium never gave any of us a specific answer. It just slowly let most of us come back over the course of the next few weeks. I tried to get re-engaged, but I couldn’t. I pulled a lot of my content off of Medium – including my second article that had just been boosted a few days before. I didn’t know what I did wrong, according to the bots at least, so I didn’t know how to prevent it from happening again. Why would I spend so much time and energy on Medium if they could strip it away – and my profits – without any kind of reassurance that it wouldn’t happen again or without knowing how I could prevent it?
Now, plenty of other authors have re-engaged since then. However, many decided to spend their time and energy on other endeavors.
The bottom line is – yes, you can make money on Medium if you write well and are active in the community. However, I strongly recommended that you read and understand every rule. In addition, proceed cautiously, and get very acquainted with what works and doesn’t work for other writers.