Member-only story
How much can you make on Medium? (or, how much I didn’t make with 200K+ views)
I started writing on Medium in 2017, but only recently joined the partner program. My most popular post (link below) has accumulated 210K views and 95 hours of member reading time. Awesome. In total, I have earned $3.33 from it. Not so awesome. This is because I published the article in late 2017 but only joined the partner program in April 2021.
Now, I don’t write on Medium to make a lot of money. I enjoy writing and thinking about ways to explain data science and machine learning concepts clearly. Medium is a really nice way to reach an audience for this material and getting some additional coffee money is a bonus. But, naturally I began to wonder how much I would have earned for that article if I had joined the partner program earlier. Being a curious data scientist, I had to dive in.
Taking a data driven approach to earnings
The Medium partner program makes it possible for authors to earn money for their posts. When an article is published via the partner program the author is eligible to receive a share of the subscription revenue generated from the Medium members that engage with their articles. More engagement from members, more money.
I am not really too interested in the specifics of how the algorithm works (for the purposes of this post at least), but to answer my question I need to understand the relationship between the two key article engagement metrics — internal views and member reading time — and earnings. And, for that I need data.
The easiest thing to do is to use the data that is available to me by virtue of being a member of the partner program. For each article published within the partner program I get access to the daily internal and external view count, member reading time in minutes and its earnings. I manually…
