It has been 5 years since I joined Medium and started posting my writing on the platform, and my reasons for joining Medium had been to create content and have it read by a wider audience.
Below are excerpts from my blog entry which remains true to today.
“I came here because it enabled me to write and post my words out there, to an international audience.
I write here because it puts ideas into a communicative form and spreads it out.
I write because I find satisfaction in creating content.“
But one thing I haven’t mentioned much is that I also joined Medium to make a bit of extra money whenever paying members read my work.
And though I had slowed down posting on Medium in the last 2 years, I still occasionally checked my stats on the platform to see how much my stories earned.
However this week i received a email notification from Medium that from now on, only paying members were allowed to paywall their stories. Why would that affect me?
Well, I actually had yet to join Medium with a paid membership account till today. Stubbornly, I didn’t want to have a monthly or yearly paying subscription, since i didn’t have much time to read other writer’s content and browse through the stories posted there.
So, I summarize my total Medium earnings today, just to know how much had I earned from my posted stories the last 5 years, and as a checkpoint how far I’ve come.
In total 200 stories were posted in that period.
One thing to mention also is how over time the method of monetization from Medium had changed, and in general the stories from earlier 2021-2022 did better.
So, including the stories posted from August 2021 to date, my overall total lifetime earnings come to $119.42 ( or MYR 484.63 in Malaysian ringgit).
However, since Medium is a US-based entity, so payments made to content creators—especially non-US tax residents without a qualifying tax treaty claim—were subject to a standard 30% US income tax withholding rate. So I received much less than what I earned.
That means total payout is $83.59 ( MYR 339.24).
Not much, but good to have as a plus point to writing online.
The monthly earnings in my first 2 years were decent enough for the amount I wrote, and then slowed down by 2024 to current.
Below screenshot is shows how Medium presents this dataset for submitted writing:
And interestingly my top 3 stories with highest income were below:
And as for my blog, I checked the statistics of reader count and the demographic by country for the last 12 months, seems my highest viewership are from USA and China:
Moving forward, I’ve yet to decide if I intend to start a paying subscription to Medium, but what’s for sure is thar I will still write on my personal blog here, and keep this archive of stories that I can look back to over the years.