Is it worth writing on Medium anymore?
One of the first writers I came across when I first started logging onto Medium was Hudson Rennie.
Hudson is a great writer, and he touched on the kinds of health and wealth topics that I — and almost everyone, really — are interested in.
I considered him one of the marquee writers on the platform because the algo kept serving up his work alongside that of Tim Denning, Eve Arnold, Zulie Rane, and others.
These writers were Medium.
So when someone like him wonders aloud whether it’s even worth writing here anymore, it worries me a lot.
Like me, Hudson also has a YouTube channel that talks a lot about writing on this platform.
Here’s what he said in his video posted yesterday:
“Now Medium is normally my biggest source of income, but I’ve actually had two back-to-back months that have made me rethink the amount of effort I’m putting into my articles.
“My approach on Medium is always high risk, high reward, meaning I put a lot of time and energy into my articles hoping they’ll go viral, this as opposed to a high volume approach, which lots of writers adapt.
“Simply post as often as they can hoping to hit a viral topic (and) not as concerned with the contents of their articles.
“To be honest, as my newsletter and this (YouTube) channel grows, it’s become harder and harder for me to put in the amount of effort I do into each Medium article, especially when I have months like these.”
He then references an hourly wage of about $15 per hour writing here.
Hudson Rennie isn’t the first big-name writer to get slammed by the new payment approach.
Plenty of folks spoke up when it first launched.
I’ve made videos and written about it at length.
Now given I have a YouTube channel almost exclusively focused on writing here, you’d be right in assuming I’m still a huge fan of the site.
I love the writing experience, I love the reading experience.
But I do worry about its future if it continues to pay writers in a way that pushes great ones like Hudson to consider leaving for good.
I’d be lying if I said the thought hasn’t crossed my mind at times too.
Now things haven’t been quite as bleak for me, even despite the 70% haircut I took overnight under the new payment program (later reduced to a 55% cut following an algorithm tweak).
But one thing the changes did make me do was spend a lot of time looking around for better options re: how to spend my time.
It looks like Hudson has found a couple that appeal to him, and reading his tone, he doesn’t seem all that thrilled about the idea of sticking around here if things don’t change.
And that makes me sad.
I love this place and I want it to thrive.
But I do hope it figures out soon that scrapping the referral program and paying a ton more for engagement at the expense of read time was a huge mistake.
This Week in Side Hustling
Folks, welcome to the second edition of This Week in Side Hustling, wherein I recap my earnings across all platforms and assess what’s working, what isn’t, and seek to identify new areas to explore.
If you missed the first one, you can check that out here.
Let’s get to it.
Where I earn my side hustle money
Here are my earnings for the year in all income areas ($USD)
And here’s what I earned each day over the past week in each category.
Finally, here are the latest updates from my Publish Every Day project, wherein I’m trying to earn enough to leave commuter life within 1 year by publishing on various platforms and putting the earnings into passive income instruments (these are in $CAD).
My end goal is $250 per day.
Now let’s look at what worked this week, what didn’t, and what I’m planning to tackle next.
Blogging income update
I actually had a pretty strong end of the week writing here:
My daily average earnings from blogging in 2024 is $31.19
My daily average over the past week was $34.33
Something weird happened here.
My earnings popped big on Friday.
Now I wondered if this had anything to do with a blog post by the site’s head of product, Buster Benson, published that day.
In it, he wrote that the site was ramping up efforts to combat spam and fraud and had banned a bunch of accounts that were gaming the engagement system.
He also wrote that:
“This is good for readers, but it’s also good for writers: by suspending these fraudulent accounts, we are redistributing those funds back to writers. We will continue to do this, and to adapt our program as we need to, in months ahead.”
As I said, my RPM was unusually high on Friday, so I assume this is the reason why.
This is all well and good of course and I have noticed a lot more spam comments circulating around the site.
But I do wonder if this all could have been avoided had the site never gone down the ill-conceived route of massively pumping up payments for reader comments at the expense of read time (which I believe is the best measure of who is bringing value here and the fairest metric for paying writers).
Whatever the case, I’m happy to get a pay bump as a legit writer at the expense of the lazy AI clowns.
YouTube income update
This coming week on YouTube should be interesting.
My daily average earnings from YouTube in 2024 is $1.81
My daily average over the past week was $1.63
I posted a video last week and then realized I had a mistake in it, so I had to take it down.
Here’s the new version:
I also posted this one about dividend investing which I expected to do poorly (which it did). It’s part of my long-term strategy on YouTube, however, so it was worth the experiment:
What’s interesting about these two videos in particular?
They’re my first couple of cracks at faceless vids.
It’s not that I have a problem being on camera — every other one features my ugly mug — it’s that I found it really hard to post consistently when I had to film.
This way, I just recorded audio whenever I had some quiet time sitting in the car waiting for things and put stock footage over it.
I plan to write some follow-up posts and lessons learned on the experience of faceless videos.
I’ve also been considering how to bring more health content to YouTube, given health is my main niche on this site.
I was considering whether or not to start a second channel for that or just post the occasional video on my main, monetized one, but I couldn’t really decide what to do.
So I put it out to my viewers, and here’s what they came back with:
The people have spoken, so I’ll drop a health vid in here and there and see what happens.
Stock market income update
I’m not satisfied with just making side hustle money.
I need that money to produce even more money.
The way I do this is via stock market investing.
Let’s look at dividends first:
My daily average earnings from dividends in 2024 is $1.06
My daily average over the past week was $0.16
With interest rates so high, bond yields are also high, and I continue to get a steady flow of dividend income from the bonds I own.
This was a slow week because bonds pay out closer to the beginning and middle of the month.
As you can see from my portfolio below, I’ve been buying up bond ETFs for months on the heels of an historic crash in prices.
Now they pay me every month, and I can sell them when prices recover.
My top stock portfolio holdings (I have way more positions than this overall):
This week was interesting from a trading perspective.
Now typically I make small buys on red days over long periods of time, and that’s good enough for me.
I’ve crushed the S&P 500 doing that over the past year and a half.
But over that time, I’ve started developing a feel for how stocks are trading relative to the market.
Take apparel giant Nike.
I’ve started building a position in the company, but I didn’t love the underlying weakness I was seeing in the weeks leading up to earnings, so I shorted it for earnings as a hedge.
Sure enough, Nike dropped about 7% on weak guidance and I closed the option for a capital gain of about $48.66 CAD.
A small trade for sure, but the benefit of side hustling is that it provides the money for me to do things like that.
My daily average earnings from capital gains is $3.07
My daily average over the past week was $5.23
More money from side hustling = more options for investing.
My hourly wage from side hustling
I always measure my success in the content game against what I could make working a regular job.
As long as I’m hopping over the low bar of beating minimum wage ($15 per hour in Canada), I’m happy.
I count my work time in 15-minute blocks, and last week I worked 47 blocks — mostly on YouTube to get those videos out. That comes to 11.75 hours.
I earned $384.93 from side hustling last week
$384.93 / 11.75 hours = $32.76 per hour
The previous week, I did $48.36 per hour but only worked 7 hours on higher-value content.
I knew I was making a sacrifice spending so much time with YouTube this week, but I think its long-term potential is much higher than blogging.
Still, I made double the minimum wage working on content, so it’s a pretty decent part-time job.
What’s next?
I’m going to see how these faceless YouTube videos do and consider how that affects my YouTube strategy going forward.
I’m also going to be keeping a close eye on whether that pop in earnings on this site was a one-off or the start of something bigger.
If this site moves back closer to the old way of paying writers, that would be a total game-changer for me.
And that’s why, circling back to the question I posed at the top: yes, I do still think it’s worth writing on Medium, and I think that the management team here wants the site to succeed as much as I do.
So that’s why I keep writing and keep the faith that they’ll make the right moves in the long run and my audience will be much bigger when they do.
Thanks for reading! Drop any questions or ideas you have in the comments!
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Disclaimer: The author of this article is not a financial advisor. This commentary is provided for general informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice. It does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities referred to. Consult your financial advisor prior to making financial decisions.
Sadly, I get the feeling Medium has passed its peak and is now on the way down. That slide, I predict, will accelerate.