Medium destroyed my earnings AGAIN (I'm secretly happy)
Monday motivation 1
If you caught any of my crying last week either here or on Medium, you’ll know the latter platform has rug-pulled writers like me yet again.
As I wrote in this piece, my earnings just tanked 50% overnight.
I wrote to Medium support to see whether this was some kind of calculation error … surely such a sudden, jarring move couldn’t be intentional.
I’ve received crickets in response - that’s likely because a lot of folks are away for the holidays - but I know full well they probably planned the move.
I was just kind of curious as to what the explanation would be this time.
Regardless, the lull has given me a lot of time to reflect on my content side hustle journey over the past 2.5 years and where I want to go next.
And at the end of the day, it’s probably a good thing if Medium did, in fact, screw me again.
Allow me to explain why.
The advantage of Medium as a side hustle
Medium has - or perhaps I should say had in the case of earnings - a couple of big advantages over other side hustles:
It’s extremely easy to get started - all you need is a laptop and internet connection
It starts paying you for your work almost immediately
Contrast that with, say, YouTube, which requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours before you can even apply to join the Partner Program.
I was a top 6% earner on Medium within a month or two of joining, whereas it took me about 11 months to get monetized on YouTube.
Now this was all fine when Medium was paying really well.
Why gamble away a year or more trying to build on other platforms (typically it takes 2 years to make real progress anywhere) when you could get instant, financial feedback from the top blogging platform?
People were incentivized to make Medium the center of their side hustle plans, and I was all in.
It did pay off at first.
It was so lucrative, in fact, that I regularly made videos like this about it:
But as the chart I posted above showed, things have been on the downslope for some time.
Let me put it another way:
Today I earned $30 for writing on Medium
A month ago, I would have earned $60 for the same number of views
A year ago, I would have earned $90
Two years ago, I would have earned $200
OK, so why is this good?
Tim Denning’s warnings
I should have seen it coming.
A short while after the implementation of the first big L for big writers - the August 2023 launch of the new Medium Partner program - the site’s erstwhile runaway No. 1 writer, Tim Denning, wrote a piece about the perils of relying on someone else’s platform for anything.
Build your email list, he exhorted.
If you don’t own your audience, you don’t own anything.
It turned out to be prescient, and you could tell from the tone of his posts that he saw the writing on the wall.
And yet those warnings fell on deaf ears (guilty) because the money on Medium was actually really good once you built a following and learned what did and didn’t work on the site.
In a way, Medium’s very competitive payouts served as golden handcuffs.
Again, why spend time building an AdSense site or an email list on Substack when you could make money right now, TODAY, if you just published more articles on Medium?
Sure, the ceiling was low … way lower than YouTube, which regularly mints millionaires … but it could be something approaching a living.
And all the while, winter was coming.
A change is going to come
It was actually all kind of mentally exhausting.
Yes, I loved making a nice hourly wage writing, but there was always a little tinge of dread in the background.
I’d heard from people who wrote on Medium in its heyday that what I thought was great money was actually a comparative pittance.
Could they pull the rug out again?
Well, August 2023 answered that question (yes), but I’ll admit I let my guard again down even after that.
“Surely”, I thought to myself, “they couldn’t possibly make it even worse?”
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
And through it all, I’d be beating myself up with questions like:
Why are you so lazy with your YouTube channel?
Some of these people on Substack are doing really well - could you duplicate that?
If you built an AdSense site, what would that look like? Could you make it work? How much could you make?
Well now, with my RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) hitting a low of $8.79 last week on Medium, there are no more excuses.
I now make significantly more per 1,000 on YouTube, and given I intend to write about business and finance on my own site, my RPM there stands to far outpace Medium’s as well.
So yes, in spite of it all, I’m excited.
All this time I’ve been agonizing over projects I wanted to try but couldn’t commit the time?
Now I can find out once and for all if I can pull off things like, say, 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, 10,000 Subscribers on Substack, or truly gross revenues on AdSense.
Sure, I might fail. But at least I’ll know. At least I’ll be able to say I tried.
What’s my future on Medium?
I have 30,000 followers there, so I’m not going to throw that away.
But instead of building, I’m going to tread water with 1-2 articles per week on the only subject I cover that has lousy RPM from advertising but does huge views for me on Medium: Health content.
Is there a part of me that’s sad I won’t be able to fully embrace and love that site the way I have for the past two and a half years?
Absolutely.
But as I’ve said already, it’s hard to love something that much when it doesn’t love you back.
Have you given up on Medium already?
What project are you most excited about?
Let me know in the comments!
My top 5 trending stories today
I’ve switched to the similar approach. 1 to 2 articles
I really like writing on Medium, but it's more and more depressing being over there every day. I completely understand why you also want to pivot away from there.
I'm dedicated to using Medium as a testing ground for topics, and I also want to see if I can target SEO keywords since it has a high domain authority.