Yes, you can make a full-time income on Medium (Month 8 earnings)
Lots of people come to Medium with dreams of throwing off the shackles of a daily commute and a clown boss, embracing the romantic writer’s life, and getting rich, rich, rich!
While I have long argued that you’ll never get rich writing on Medium, I’m starting to change my tune on whether or not you could make a full-time income blogging on the platform.
That’s because, in Month 8, I made what some would consider a full-time income despite only working about 14 hours.
Allow me to elaborate as I walk you through the numbers, show you the potential of this amazing platform, and give you some pointers on how you can boost your own earnings.
The Month 8 numbers
OK, let’s start with a look at the numbers for my main account
and what drove by far my biggest-ever month on Medium (April 2023).
As you can see, the slow build actually begins in mid-March and culminates in a truly explosive day on April 7, resulting in my biggest single 24-hour period for views on Medium (6,354 views) ever.
After that, I settle into a low hum of 1,500–2,000 views per day for the next couple of weeks until another monster pop on the last day of the month:
Although I did have an unusual string of above-average hits that month, much of my success came from just TWO viral articles.
If you’ve followed my writing here or my YouTube channel for any amount of time, you’ll have heard about one of them before.
Here’s a video I made about it:
So keep in mind at the time I filmed that video, the story had only returned some $850.
Look at this bad boy now:
So what happened here?
Top content never dies
I remember when I first started writing on Medium, I’d see stories from veteran writers talking about the magic of having articles that they thought were long dead just all of a sudden rising from the ashes.
Well, now I can speak to it from personal experience.
My exercise story, which I’d originally written in November, woke up on March 1 and went on an insane, consistent run that continues today.
Meanwhile, another story ignited around the same time.
At the end of March, I published this one:
Were my two viral stories working in tandem, pushing each other higher and higher?
I feel like the first one laid the groundwork for the second one to take off, and then the second one extended the earnings tail of the first.
As I’ve written before, the magic of viral stories is they’re kind of like that old saying, “A high tide lifts all boats.”
Put another way, a viral story can turn your past singles into doubles and triples.
While these two were doing huge numbers, my smaller stories were also getting a nice bump from all the new eyes on my work.
It becomes a bit like a snowball rolling down a hill.
OK, so what did that mean for actual dollar earnings for my biggest-ever month on Medium?
Is this a full-time salary?
Let’s say I keep working as hard as I am now (or, ideally, even harder) and I manage to sustain this level of earnings.
There are 12 months in a year, so $2,773.19 x 12 = $33,278.28.
But wait, there’s more.
I live in Canada, so I’m also benefitting from the current strength of the U.S. dollar.
So the amount that actually landed in my bank account was $3,736.38.
$3,736.38 x 12 = $44,836 CAD (!)
The average annual salary here in Canada is a shade over $59,000, so we’re getting pretty close to that number.
That’s the average. Certainly, there are many people working full-time jobs who make less.
Change your perspective
Is that a mind-blowing annual salary?
Maybe not, but keep in mind I’ve only been writing on Medium part-time for about 9–10 months now.
If you divided my April earnings by the number of hours I worked, I would have earned $262.17/hour that month.
I think people would do well to recalibrate what they consider to be “life-changing money”.
There’s this idea that you have to make multiple millions of dollars and drive Lambos to “change your life”.
In fact, the number is a lot smaller than you think.
Any amount of extra cash gives you breathing room. It gives you opportunities to do things you otherwise couldn’t.
What has this modest amount changed in my life?
Well, that money, combined with my day job, now has me on pace to earn not only more than my boss but also my boss’s boss.
This is a powerful thing.
For me, this was never about Lambos.
The dream of side hustling for me is not to need the job I have.
Now, I like my job, I’m good at it, it pays me well, and I work with wonderful people.
Why would I want to ditch that?
But the priceless thing that side hustling gives you is options.
If I wanted to leave my job, I could do it and still have a nice little cash buffer.
Or I could take a job that pays less and still make as much as I do from my day job now.
So the answer is yes, you can make a full-time salary on Medium.
I did it that month, and I’ve done it again since.
Work, work, work
But even if you can, that doesn’t mean you will.
In fact, most people won’t because most people are lazy.
Many people come to Medium thinking it’s some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, that just because they show up and post something that’s rushed and low-quality they’re entitled to make a ton of money.
Or, worse, that they can generate some junk content using ChatGPT, post it, and rake in dollars.
Let me be really upfront here: you cannot game the system.
More and more, Medium is going after people who use AI and post trash content.
In fact, I’ve seen a couple of posts from people saying Medium denied their Medium Partner Program application because the company suspected the applicant was using AI to generate content.
Frequently, too, I’ll add an article someone has written to my “To Read” reading list and, by the time I get back to it, Medium has deleted it.
If you are a legitimate writer, this is a good thing.
The more people push garbage into the commons, the more your high-quality, well-written work will stand out.
But the catch is that you actually have to sit down and do the work.
This piece is re-published from my Medium publication Side Hustling.
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I would say that this is a success story! Well done on achieving this.