Medium Won’t Pay the Bills, But It Might Build Your Writing Platform

What I Learned From My First Month in the Partner Program

I started writing for Medium back in 2016, but I didn’t join the Partner Program until the end of February. Here’s what I learned in my first full month in the program.

I’m not getting rich any time soon.

Here are my stats for March, 2021:

March Medium analytics for Pablo Andreu — Medium

Based on those numbers, Medium will pay out $3.15. This puts my rate at about a penny a read.

I know, I know, that’s not how they determine payouts, which are based on membership reading time. Essentially, you get a percentage of a members’ reading time that month.

How Medium calculates payouts

If a member spends 20 minutes reading Medium content during the last 30 days, and they read one of your stories, which takes, say, five minutes to read, you’ll earn $1.25 (25 percent of their $5.00 monthly membership fee).

But since I don’t have visibility into share of reading time, I’m going to use the crude dollar-per-reads ratio as a way to frame the conversation.

Determining my Medium pay rate.