Medium is a social publishing site launched by Blogger creator and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams in 2012. It’s a blogging platform accessible to all and hosts many ideas, perspectives, and stories. Popular topics on Medium include mental health, social media, global affairs, trending news, productivity hacks and more. We will guide you on how to make money on Medium, so continue reading this post.
What Are Medium’s Articles All About
Medium.com is essentially the Youtube of writing. Like Youtube, when you join Medium and write stories you love, you can earn money when paying members read your articles. Additionally, Medium adopts “member reading time” as the primary metric for making cash on the platform. You can also earn a commission when a non-member reads your articles and signs up within a month.
Contrary to Youtube, if a non-paying member of Medium reads your writing, you don’t earn money from it. However, that same page might be shared, and the reader may sign up. In that case, it may help the various algorithms push it into other people.
Medium is one of the most straightforward and most user-friendly free blogging platforms today. It is full of hundreds of thousands of stories, articles, poems, and essays. Many people sign up to read great content from writers. Another feature of the platform is the site’s minimalistic design, with plenty of white space and limited formatting options. The simple layout highlights the importance of the articles posted by writers.
Whether you’re an avid reader or someone who wants to explore the art of writing, Medium.com is the right place for you.
How To Make Money On Medium
Anyone who has a Medium account is eligible to write for Medium. There’s no review process involved.
First, sign up for a free Medium account (with the option to upgrade to the full $5/month membership for unlimited access), and ta-da! You’re ready to pursue your passion for writing.
But, your post needs to follow Medium’s content rules and guidelines. For example, you can’t promote dubious content on your Medium account. You can’t promote buying or selling social media engagement, including off-platform. Moreover, you can’t publish anything considered affiliate marketing content. You can read more about Medium policies here.
So how much do writers on Medium earn? Some people make a lucrative income on Medium.com. The top writers earned from $5,000 to $30,000 in one fantastic month in 2020.
But those kinds of figures are limited. Whether you earn more or a little money depends on how much effort you invest. Well,that’s the reality in any career or business, right?
Before aiming to make money by writing on Medium, ask yourself these questions first:
- Is your intention to make a full-time living?
- Is your goal to earn cash every month?
- Are you joining Medium to explore the hobby of writing?
The above three questions are essential in setting your expectations right. If you want publishing articles on Medium to be a full-time source of income, you need to consider it a full-time job. Or at least part-time, with at least 10 to 20 hours a week devoted to writing or publishing content. The hardest but most rewarding part is to be consistent. Once you become consistent, expect to achieve great success after 1 to 2 years.
Here’s the formula for success as shared by J.J. Pryor on Medium:
Time + Repetition + Quality = Success on Medium
How Does Medium Pay Writers
Medium has a few different layers of membership. These are the following:
1. Join Medium to become a user
This layer of membership allows you to post stories. But it requires you to add more details to avoid bots or scam systems. As a user, you can only view three articles per month. Medium shows a reminder once you reach a three-article limit and encourages you to sign up for full membership.
2. Sign up for the Medium Partner Program (MPP)
Signing up to this layer enables your articles to be eligible to earn money.
To join the MPP, go to your settings page on the Medium homepage by clicking your profile image in the bottom left corner. Then go to the “Medium Partner Program” tab. It will take you to a page that defines the concept and has a link to join. This is also free.
Read and understand the few simple steps to help get everything legal. Take note that Medium currently uses the Stripe platform. So, people in selected countries might be ineligible to earn money on their Medium accounts.
3. Become a Medium Member
This membership level gives you unlimited access to read stories on the platform. Part of your subscription will go to support other writers on the site.
You can click the “upgrade” button near your profile image on the Medium homepage. If you can’t find it, don’t worry, Medium will find a way to ping you eventually to join.
It’s pretty affordable at $5 per month or $50 per year. This allows you to have unlimited reads and post an unlimited number of stories each day.
How Much Do Writers Earn On Medium
Making a full-time living on Medium is probably a secret goal of most writers on this platform. But you should know that only 9% of writers on Medium make more than $100 a month. That’s 9% of an estimated 200,000–400,000 writers on the platform, amongst 34 million total members.
Some key points you should remember before going further:
- The top writers on Medium, which accounts for less than 1 percent, earn $5000 to $30,000 monthly.
- Almost 94 percent of writers earn $100/month or less.
- Almost 60 percent of writers made some money or $1 up.
- Most top writers started earning that much after working hard for 1 to 2 years. In short, making money on this platform is a long-term goal.
Meanwhile, you can also write for free on Medium. You don’t need to be a paying member to post stories if you want to try it out first.
Conclusion
Now that we’re done with the basics of how to make money on Medium, it’s time to go ahead and be creative.
Joining the platform is almost hassle-free. It has a simple design and has a crazy high domain authority or DA (95 as of this writing). If you’re unfamiliar with the importance of domain authority, it involves a scale that ranks websites from 1 to 100. A higher score shows a website can rank better.
