Medium earnings recover huge, KDP gaining steam (This Week in Side Hustling)

Jan 20, 2025

I was really sad there for a while.

After two very successful and profitable years writing on Medium, I really thought this might be the end.

And after watching my income slide a little bit each month for the past year, I, like many others, watched in horror as my earnings got annihilated in January.

People who once earned dollars per story started earning pennies, and people who were earning pennies started earning nothing.

It was pandemonium.

As people started migrating over to Substack in droves and big-name writers pledged not to contribute anymore, Medium was mum (outside of a few cryptic comments from execs on people’s stories).

Then an email came out saying they were aware of the problem and were working on a fix.

And over the past few days, my earnings have totally recovered and then some.

There are a few possible explanations for this:

Medium fixed earnings across the board
Medium marked my account as safe
The potential fix I identified in this post actually worked

I’ve heard from others that their earnings have also recovered, but my pal

Huck & Finn in Spain

says he hasn’t seen movement yet.

Number 2 is a possibility … my account got suspended about a year ago after accidentally getting caught up in some spam filters and they quickly fixed it after I emailed.

I did email to note the earnings issues this time and haven’t heard back, but it’s possible they flicked a switch and marked me as “not AI”.

I’m leaning toward No. 3 as the real reason, but I’ve asked a couple other people to try it and report back, so I’ll update here.

Regardless, here’s how much my Medium earnings have shot up the past week:

Wednesday: $41.78

Thursday: $36.26

Friday: $51.93

Saturday: $69.69

Sunday: $77.79

Monday: $94.47

Put another way, my RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) was $30 yesterday, whereas on Thursday it was $20 and earlier this month it was below $10.

If this holds, I think Medium is officially back.

And to that, I say: thank goodness.

I love Medium and I want it to succeed.

But there is a lesson here: the site can only cut earnings so much before people flee en masse.

We saw the red line get crossed this month.

OK, let’s get to the rest of the numbers.

Medium earnings this week: $422.05

I won’t spend much more time on this, but Medium has always been - and I hope will continue to be - at the center of my side business efforts.

I am a writer. I’ve always been a writer. I’ll always be a writer.

And when Medium is cooking, there’s still no site better for pure writers who want to earn right away.

The beauty of content creation is that, once you publish a story or a video or a book, it becomes your little employee.

It goes out into the world every day on your behalf and comes home with a little bit (or a lot) of money.

That’s been the case with Medium for me this month. My top-earning story was published three months ago, on Oct. 28.

The beauty of content creation is that it can theoretically pay you forever.

Let’s hope things stay on the rails going forward.

Kindle Direct Publishing earnings this week: $12.31

This is the side hustle I’m most bullish on moving forward.

One of the side benefits of Medium pissing me off the past few weeks is that I was extremely motivated to put way more effort into my other business interests.

One of those was KDP.

I love creating physical products - there’s just something so satisfying about being able to hold something you created in your hands - but I hadn’t really had any success at it.

And I think that’s because I wasn’t following one of my Golden Rules of Content Creation.

Before you write a post or publish a video or create a product, you should ask yourself: Would I personally read/watch/buy this?

If you wouldn’t, you might just be cynically chasing money rather than creating value for your audience.

I had previously created products because I thought I could take advantage of an underserved niche, but at the end of the day, they weren’t things I would personally buy.

So this time, I created something I would buy, and that I actually do use every day.

As an ADHD person, I have a hard time staying on task, so I created a system using 1 white sheet of paper to organize my day.

From that desire to save myself time, The Power To-Do List was born.

Have you ever seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary series on Netflix?

In it, he repeats this quote from media magnate Ted Turner:

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, advertise.”

I’d worked really hard on a product that I believed in, but I forgot the last part.

Now I’m less shy about letting people know about it, because I honestly believe it has the power to change people’s lives (all for less than $10).

While taking a break from Medium, I went hard at Substack and YouTube and decided to use those platforms to get the word out about the PTDL.

And I’ve sold 9 copies this month!

That number may not be all that impressive, but it’s a start.

More importantly, I’ve already heard from a couple people who say it’s been a game-changer for their productivity.

Here’s the link on Amazon if you want to check it out. You can get it in any country that Amazon produces KDP books in.

YouTube video earnings this week: $2.33

I’ve been a touch lazy with YouTube over the past 6 months or so, but as with that top-earning Medium story, my little employees continue to work every day.

My top-earning video is one I published almost a year ago now:

YouTube podcast earnings this week: $2.63

I refer to videos where I don’t show my face and really just kinda talk about stuff as YouTube Podcasts. I publish them to podcast playlists and thus they also show up in the YouTube Music app.

I published two this past week that account for all those earnings:

This one, in the Publish Every Day podcast: