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For folks who write for Medium.com, what's your engagement like, and how much do you make?
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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The thing about medium is that it's a trusted domain + mailing list + blog + search engine in one. All you have to do is sign up and start writing, for free.
Sure you can have your own domain, and spin up a cheap VPS which has WordPress or other blogging software, customize and setup the share buttons and theme and other plugins, pay MailChimp or another trusted relay to actually inbox your emails, use Google Analytics or some open source complex privacy-focused analytics, and then set up your advertisements or some scheme to contact you for article product placement if you actually want to make money from it. If you're really good and knowledgeable in your field. That's a lot of time invested and very expensive relatively (compared to free).
I think a lot of people just want to share their knowledge, getting paid pennies for page views comes second to that.
Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).
If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.
Unless you're writing some insanely great shit about a ridiculously popular topic or you majorly luck out somehow, it stands no chance of getting huge. It's like sports stars. For every one of those there's tens or hundreds of thousands that nobody will ever hear about.
Or maybe I just suck and I'm bitter lol. My website was doing like 11k visits a month, max, at one point. I think I got like 2 checks from Google in five years. Enough for two fancy date nite dinners.
Nope, that's about standard or even better than most, unless you're doing it full-time.
Unless you're making more than $16 each month (most are not making anywhere close to that) from Medium then you're just choosing another company to profit off of you. It's also more work and takes a lot (arguably, depending on your technical comfort level) more time because again... most people have nothing of much value to say. If you're an expert on your field or a great marketer, sure maybe you can make that $16 back and then some. Most can not. You'll know if you can, and you can look at your medium analytics and judge that and then do the Wix thing because........
Medium is like an ocean in part because it's so easy and free. There are some really spectacular fish and animals and rare finds and even shipwrecks full of gold and treasure. There is also a metric shit-ton of mediocrity.
A comparison could be made to YouTube or tiktok. Sure, you can make videos and upload them to your website and then share them. But there is immense value in the existing community in algorithm.