Writing on Medium.com – My Earnings in the First Month

I joined the Medium Partner Program a month ago in early August of 2021 as a way to expand my writing and to make something out of it financially (for those of you who are new on Medium, the Medium Partner Program is the means by which writers get paid for their content published on Medium platform).

I already had a personal blog that I started actively writing on this year to explore my passion for writing and to document down these articles. But as personal blogs go, it does feel like writing to the void sometimes, whereby there are not many readers who will find your content, other than family and friends who came to know of my blogging from my Facebook posts of it now and then.

Even so, I proceed to purchase my own domain name as it became apparent that I have found something that I enjoyed working on and I wasn’t going to give up on making it is a writer, even if it was on a part-time basis as I had a full-time day job.

I then sought out other writing avenues and I found Medium.

As a beginner on Medium I knew that the fundamentals of earning an income on Medium was through having paying Medium members read your articles. I also found out that the main way of getting views and readers for your published articles was through either of below methods:

a. Writing for a Medium publication

b. Getting your article curated by Medium

Now in my first month, I published seven articles on topics ranging from why I started writing, relationships, parenting, and personal finance. Only one of these seven articles garnered proper viewership. Would like like to know which one? Take a guess.

Somehow it was my writing on why me and my husband did not wait to have more children that caught the attention of readers and up to now I have no idea how it did. This particular article was neither curated, nor was it published in any of Medium’s publications.

In fact, my one article on why I rejected a zero interest rate credit card was included into a publication but even that article did not generate many readers. Maybe some more experienced Medium writers may know the algorithm better than me. If you do, do help enlighten me in the comments section, I would appreciate the feedback.

Other highlights in my first month writing on Medium?

I had one article accepted into a personal finance publication linked here at Financial Independence/Retire Early.

While another of my articles was scouted and I received a personal email requesting if it could be republished to an independent online lifestyle magazine, with credits to my original writing source. Along with the request from the editor, was an offer to do some paid writing on their magazine, but of course the topic had to be one of their audience preference.

Anyway to answer the question for this article, on how much I earned on my first month writing on Medium? Number below.

USD 5.12

Some key things to take note below.

Medium will only pay out once the earnings reach $10 into your stripe account. Also, it is taxable, in compliance to the US Law. This information is relevant to those of us who are non-US citizens. Hence, I will do a sharing again on how much actual payout is received after I have hit that first payout threshold.

Another key thing to note is that Medium has recently revised the terms for the Medium Partner Program. The new terms requires that only writers who have at least 100 followers are eligible to join the program and for existing members on this program like me, we had up to end of December 2021 to get to this number of followers in order to remain on the Medium Partner Program.

Now when this was announced I felt pretty discouraged as after my first month, I only had up to 5 followers and it seemed pretty mathematically difficult to get to 100 followers on Medium with less than 4 months to go till the end of the year, meaning I may possibly be axed from being eligible to get paid for content posted in this platform by then. This is quite a blow for new aspiring writers, at least for me since I just started to get some traction on this whole blogging and writing arena.

Even so, it is worth to note that even if you are not paid on Medium, writing on this platform at least gives your work some visibility to the community of online readers and some of them may be editors at other independent publications or magazines. A stepping stone if you may, to other opportunities for writing.

As an ending note, if you are a Medium member, do become a follower if you enjoyed my writing or if it gave some value to you. It will help me stay on this program and it does give me a little encouragement when I see a new follower pop up in my Medium profile page.

Thanks for reading and all the best in your Medium journey.