Make Money with Medium

byDianeScorpio

18.3K followers

10 months ago

So, I am aware that some of you use Medium to direct traffic to your website, but did you know you can be paid, too?

What exactly is Medium?

Medium.com is essentially a blogging platform, you can write about anything you want, not just your niche subject.

(Within reason, of course, no adult content, violence, etc).

There are two tiers of membership, free and paid.

The free membership allows you to post, follow others, engage with them, add comments, etc, but you cannot be monetized.

The paid membership allows for monetization and costs only $5 per month or $50 per year.

There is no waiting period, you can be paid right from your first post.

But of course, there are some rules!

Eligibility for Monetization

Be a paid member.

Have published a story within the last 6 months.

Be in an eligible country.

Be at least 18 years old.

Be prepared to submit tax details.

Payments are made by Stripe, and if you don't submit verified taxpayer information, you won't be paid.

And if you still haven't submitted them within 180 days, you will lose any earnings you have accumulated.

Earnings will be based on member read and listen time as well as member engagement signals.

This includes claps, highlights, replies, and new follows.

Reads and read ratios will be defined as people who read your story for 30 seconds or more divided by total views.

So, the first step is to ensure your story is engaging enough to keep people reading for more than 30 seconds.

(Oh, and it does have to be a paid member reading your posts. So don't think you could set up lots of fake accounts to read your posts and boost your earnings!)

For more earnings, you need people to follow you, add comments, and "clap" or highlight your post.

And here is a very important point - is it original, human-created content?

In other words, the story does not appear to be generated by a large language model or other text-generating technology.

Medium is not a place for fully AI-generated stories, and 100% AI-generated stories will not be eligible for distribution beyond the writer’s personal network.

I have no idea how they check, but don't think you can churn out tons of AI-generated content and be paid for it!

(As an aside, if you are only using Medium to drive traffic, then AI content appears to be acceptable. I have asked AI to re-write my website posts to publish on Medium, and have no problem getting views and engagement).

Now, what you all want to know is how much you can earn?

Medium does not give any indication of this.

But, only 6% of writers earn more than $100 per month.

However, if your post is high quality and attracts a lot of readers and engagement, you can make a decent amount of money.

This is a screenshot from somebody I follow on YouTube, James Julian.

(The highlighted month indicates when his earnings dropped as a result of some changes in monetization).

I hope this inspires you to give Medium a try.

Perhaps if you are suffering from Writer's Block, and want to try a different subject, just to keep you in the habit of writing.

I am going to give this a try and will report back in 6 months.

Thank you for reading.