Let me get straight to the meat of the matter, is Medium worth it for writers to make money in 2024? My personal opinion is that no, Medium isn’t a good way for writers to make money from their writing in 2024. Let me tell you why.
My History on Medium
Let me start by giving you my history with the site.
I first joined Medium in 2019, as a place to re-publish a few older articles I’d written. However, I then left it alone for several years, making no money from those original articles.
In January 2023, I published a new article on Medium without any grand expectations, but, to my surprise, it blew up.
My Medium Earnings History
In January 2023, I made $790 from people reading my articles. I had only 4 articles on the site, and practically all of that money came from only one of those.
By April 2023, my earnings had dropped back to $30. I’d added 17 new articles since January, but none of them really got any traction. I had no way of replicating the success of my earlier article, as nobody at Medium could or would give me any explanation as to why it suddenly went viral. As quickly as that article had gone viral, it slipped back into relative obscurity again.
In February 2024, I made $1.73 from people reading my articles, despite having 53 articles on the site. That’s not a misplaced decimal point there, I really did make less than two dollars that month. That’s an average of $0.03 per article for the entire month.
As you can see, it was a meteoric rise that burnt out very quickly and fell back to earn as a pebble.
Now, many long-term, established writers on Medium were hurt by the changes to the earnings calculations that occurred around August 2023 for members-only paywalled stories. However, you can see from my stats above that earnings on Medium were unreliable even before that. Those changes just made the situation worse.
Can You Earn Money from Paywalled Stories on Medium
If you paywall your stories in the hope that you might earn money from Medium, you may be bitterly disappointed. Organic discovery on the site is pretty bad, despite what you may hear about its established audience of readers.
Nowadays, It appears that the main audience on Medium is just other writers who are also trying to earn money from the site. Therefore, unless you’re “selling shovels” in the form of “How to Be Successful on Medium” articles, you won’t get many responses to your written work.
There is the possibility that one of your stories will get “boosted” on the site, but I’ve never seen any reasonable explanation about why a particular article is selected for heavier promotion. Even when I had one of my articles seemingly go viral on Medium, the site’s staff were either not able or not willing to tell me why it had happened.
The popular opinion is that there are human gatekeepers or “editors” if you will, who manually decide what to boost based on their own preferences. Therefore, if you write about subjects that don’t click with those editors, you’re unlikely to ever get more than a handful of reads, and therefore earn next to nothing.
Since paywalling your story effectively blocks it from being read by people who aren’t Medium members, you also can’t rely on people coming to your article via Google. I’ve seen numerous claims by different people that if they see a Medium article listed in their Google search results, they’ll just ignore it because they’re sure it’ll be inaccessible behind a paywall.
Can You Earn Money from Non-paywalled Stories on Medium?
There used to be a time not so long ago where if a non-member came to Medium via your article and then became a Medium member, you’d get paid a percentage of their membership fee every month.
For many people, these recurring subscription fees accounted for more of their monthly earnings than paywalled stories. Therefore, there was a good reason for not paywalling some stories at all, and just trying to attract potential new members from Google by letting them read the whole thing for free.
The theory here was that although they read your story for free, they might then become a member in order to read the rest of what you’d written. Unfortunately, Medium also took away these referral fees, so that you no longer earn anything extra if you bring in a new member.
As it currently stands, the only real reason to post non-paywalled articles on Medium is if they contain affiliate links or links to other products that you’re selling. In other words, you’re not hoping to make money from Medium directly, you’re just hoping to convince readers to click another link and go to another site.
Why Posting Affiliate Links on Medium Could Be Bad
Posting affiliate links in free articles on Medium may sound like a reasonable tactic, but you have to consider a couple of things.
Firstly, as previously mentioned, many people are already wise to the Medium paywall, so they’ll be more inclined to avoid clicking on your article if they see it in their Google results.
Secondly, you have no control over Medium or their rules. They’ve already shown that they’re not afraid to pull the rug out from under their writing community, so who’s to say that they won’t change the rules in a few months to ban affiliate links or stories that just promote products?
It may not ever happen, but you could wake up one day to find that a Medium rule change has killed off 90% of your income while you slept. Afterall, that’s what they did to many of their writers with the recent paywall earnings calculation changes.
Why take that risk? Granted, it costs nothing to post your stories on Medium, although the site seems to be pushing more towards making writers pay for memberships, so that may change in the future.
My Best Alternative to Medium for Writers
I personally think you’re better off spending your time building up your own website using a site like Weebly. Okay, it may cost you £5-£10 a month (a free version is available), but it’s your website and you can post what you want on there (within acceptable reason). You can post affiliate links, sell your own products, and you can even add Google Adsense ads.
If you pay for your own domain name, you can even start building your own brand that will look a lot more attractive to Google searchers than a Medium article link. Your own domain link will also look more professional when you share it on social media, and professionalism helps build trust.
Sure, since it still currently costs nothing to post your article on Medium, there’s nothing to be lost by posting it there too. However, don’t make Medium the main focus of your business model.
NOTE: If you do post an article to Medium as well as your own site, be sure to point the “Canonical Link” in the Medium story settings to the article on your own site, otherwise Google will favour the Medium version over your own.
Is Medium Worth it for Writers in 2024?
To recap the original question:
Is Medium worth it for writers to make money in 2024?
My answer is no.
You can potentially make some money from Medium, but it’s pennies nowadays. The bulk of your time and effort could be better spent building your own website and brand.
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