My Medium Writing Experiment Update

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

As I posted here in January, I've been doing most of my writing on Medium lately. Medium is a large blogging platform which hosts many different publications within the platform. It also has the added benefit of having a huge audience which means that more readers will potentially be exposed to my posts. Even better, I can earn some pocket change when I write. 

Medium is an open platform where you can tailor what kind of stories you see. You pick what categories of things you like to read about: Environment, Culture, Fiction, Design, Health and Wellness, that sort of thing. Everyone's front page looks different because it's tailored to your interests. The more you read, the more the algorithm learns what you want to see. The more categories you select, the more diverse your front page is. 

Even famous and well known authors write there: I follow Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book, who posts often. Jon Krakauer writes there, and many others, including some well known politicians.

I started this experiment with Medium in January and want to ride it out at least twelve months and see if I see any growth in both readership and in earnings. So far, I've published twenty-seven articles there and my "views" have more than tripled in the last thirty days. My earnings have more than tripled as well, but when you start out at pennies, any amount of growth is good! Let's just say I'm not in the "hundred dollar club" yet.

I'm still posting here, of course. I'm comfortable here and this is my personal blog where I know my readers and they know me. But, I'm going to keep on with my Medium experiment and see what happens. 

So, if you want to check out my stuff over there, which is different from the stuff over here, here's my link and here's the Medium front page. 

See ya there!

Curious: Is Anyone Reading Medium?

As usual, I am a little late to the party, but this week I decided to start writing on Medium. 

Medium is basically a blogging platform, but it seems to be a decent place to post from time to time because of the built in audience.  Launched in August 2012 by Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, Medium has a pretty solid following. It's not clear how many subscribers have signed up for the $5 monthly subscription fee, but estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000. 

While one can read for free on Medium, some articles are behind a paywall. You can read three free articles a month on the site, but if you pony up the $5 a month, you're supporting independent journalism because the writers get paid. We don't get paid for the three free articles. 

I kind of stumbled on Medium this spring when this article by Tomas Pueyo went viral and was popping up all over the place. I thought the article was a really well done piece and if that was any indicator of what kind of work was on Medium, I wanted to know more. I've been reading there ever since, and at some point I subscribed. 

On Medium you can tailor your home screen to the types of articles you want to see by simply following categories. I've set mine to coronavirus articles, culture, history, humor, environment...that kind of thing. I like a mix of things. There's a category for writing, too, but I'm getting a lot of articles about how to write on Medium that are weighing my feed down. I might take that one off.

The site hosts professional and amateur writers and so again, pick and choose. Authors seem to be paid by views and engagement: how long someone spends on your article, claps (which is similar to the "like" button), and shares. It's all about exposure and building a following. 

I have concerns about spreading myself too thin: I blog here, at Datechguy blog, and now on Medium as well as working on my second book. But, I'm curious to see if I can spark up a following on Medium which would then develop into a little extra cash in my pocket, which is always a good thing. As my retirement date draws closer, I know that I will have more free time for writing, and so for the moment, I think I can handle three blogging platforms. My posts at each will be quite different because the audience for each is different.

We shall see.

I'm curious if any of you are Medium readers? If not, check the site out and let me know honestly what you think about it. Like I said, you get three free articles per month. Give it a shot and get back to me.