Medium earns revenue through its members’ monthly subscription of $5 per month. There are in-house curators that groom almost every story published on Medium and choose the best intake to be distributed in more than 140 topics for its potential readers.

When a story is curated, it gets a higher ranking on the homepage of Medium, in email digests and user feeds – leading to an awesome increase in Member-Only Content (MOC) views. This is exactly where the revenue happens.

How Do Writers Get Paid on Medium?

Based on users’ engagement, stories published on the Medium Platform are entitled to earn revenue. Most returning Medium members have an idea that engagement converts to “Read time”. The more you get members spending time to read your story, together with interacting through shares, claps, responses, and highlights, the more revenue the story will earn.

Getting featured is preferable to getting curated. When stories are featured, they receive an important placement, custom artwork, a professional copy edit across the social networks and Medium’s platform.

A featured piece can earn hundreds of dollars, while a curated piece normally earns $40-$300. If you’re so lucky to land a featured piece on Medium, you’ve achieved a great milestone uncommon to most writers.

Thousands of writers on Medium choose not to have their stories locked behind the Medium Partner Program. They select this option because they want wider access to their pieces – anyone from any location in the world can read an unlocked piece on Medium – which may be proficient for a business blog.

With responses from Medium influencers and Medium staff in public and private conversations, if you want to have your writing read and viewed on Medium by as many people as possible – meaning, you want to leverage Medium primarily for reach – then you must put your piece behind the Partner Program meter of Medium.

To be blunt about it, stories that are not curated on Medium do not perform well. This is exactly why most great writers on Medium over the past years, who have thousands of followers, are no longer getting much traction – they have not changed along with editorial direction on Medium – which continues to prioritize MOC (Member Only Content) for the remaining part of 2019.

Summarily, when you publish stories on Medium, any of the following can occur:

• You lock a piece but it does not get distributed (meaning, your piece was reviewed by Medium staff and did not comply with the editorial curation standards).
• You keep your write-up public and, typically, only your followers view it.
• Your write-up gets featured
• Your piece gets distributed via tags to Medium’s readership.