I’m out of the partner-program — and I’m REALLY fine with it!
Recently I released an article called “Reaching 100 Followers — a controversial take”, where I prophesied that I won’t be a Medium partner for long anymore. The day has come!
For anyone interested in the (recommended to read beforehand) mentioned article:
I argued for a different path towards 100 Followers then what seems to be the “Mainstream-take” on Medium nowadays, analysed my statistics, provided some math and measured the results, which I found intriguing, to (hopefully) prove my points or formulate my theories. I also discussed “NaturalFollowers VS. Follow4Follow” before I got to my conclusion.
This will be a follow-up article, so if you’d like to know the full story, here’s the link to the “original”.
Today at 2:44PM (GMT+2) I received the e-mail notification I’ve been waiting for since March 2nd. Curiously I wondered why my articles would still make money, even though I was supposed to be “exterminated” from the program at the beginning of March, but I still followed up the developments, which happened in my “Statistics”-area.
When I wrote my last article I’ve had 23 Followers. I’m a little proud to say that I got 28 now even though I couldn’t keep up with my marathon-publishing of February and literally published one article this month — yesterday to be specific. The reasons were plenty, not worthy to go into details now, though.
I wanted to publish one article each week and as of the work I did in February I’m still far ahead, as I already have published 21 articles this year. I’m well aware that that’s probably not how it works, consistency is probably key, but 52 articles in one year was basically my measurement. Everything additional is a bonus AND I think I’m back on track with deeming it possible to at least upload twice a month or even once a week (if the writing-gods look down on me pleasantly).
This Month of March gave me some valuable insights that proved one thing to me though, so let me double down here:
Natural Followers are my way to go!
Some more “some more math”
With my extensive pour-out of articles in February I learned at least one thing in March. Articles matter! Not just for views, but also speaking of “the dough”.
Since publishing them, my 15 February-articles alone gathered 252 Views which led to 85 reads (33,7%).
Everything I did before combined, 21 articles, since 2020 got 184 Views which led to 62 reads (33,6%).
That entails, that almost 60% (57,7 to be precise) of all my views and reads came from only my February publishings, which are 40% of all the content I’ve created on Medium so far.
Last month I ended up making something around $ 2,50, which last time I checked basically doubled to $ 4,96 in March alone EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T PUBLISH ANYTHING THIS MONTH (sorry for yelling, my dear 5 readers a month). Unfortunately I can’t get the correct numbers anymore and have to work from memory as good as I can, as my ability to check partner income has been removed. That’s why sometimes I use the word “around” or such.
I know my previous monthly record, as mention in the article linked above, was $ 0,43 from December 2021. January 2022 was something round about $ 0,35. Before that I’ve made a total of $ 1,11 over the previous two years.
I multiplied my January result by a factor of 7 and even without any additional articles I ended up doubling my February income. Within three months I made close to $ 8.00, which is more than 7 times what I made between 2020 and 2021.
And there’s another interesting side of those numbers
If I take the numbers from my previous article I made $ 1,21 up until February 19th, when I published the article. There I mentioned 101 Views and 48 reads on my articles published in 2022. That means each view was “worth” $ 0,012 and each read amounted to $ 0.025, if I count the full income towards my articles from 2022.
As my overall income rose this year to, let’s stay conservative with my estimate, $ 7.50 and attribute that as well only to my published articles from 2022. That means each view was “worth” $ 0.029 and each read amounted to $ 0.088.
Summarising:
- the value of a view doubled ($ 0.012 to $0.029)
- the value of a read almost quadrupled ($ 0.025 to $ 0.088)
- 1 view has become more valuable than 1 read previously was
Additionally I might add, after all this monetary talk, that I basically doubled my Follower-count since February 2022. I had 15 Followers at the end of January, made 8 new Followers in February and 5 in March.
And all of that within a month were I didn’t publish one single article!
Did I get lucky with my numbers?
To some degree I certainly did. While overall the “interest” in any given article I wrote has grown most of my articles this year still didn’t crack two digits, while only two have zero reads.
Out of my 22 articles 5 have reached those astounding heights of viewership (one did 10 views, which is literally the bare minimum to be called two digits).
I would like to to share my 3 best performing articles, one from January, two from February, which made together 167 views and 64 reads and cracked two digits in views and reads alike.
My top performers
1st Place
This article is by any means my best article so far. It reached almost 100 views (91) and had the most reads (39) of every article I’ve ever written.
It also gathered the most Member reading time with 1 hr 26 min.
And it was responsible for the biggest chunk of my March Income result and had made almost $ 3.00 the last time I checked while it didn’t deliver in February at all.
This article as well was considered one of my best written pieces so far in style and readability by my most honest (and brutal) critic. Not flawless, of course, but somehow I managed to improve.
If you are interested in my analysis of how the current state of culture benefited from and probably even solely was possible to be achieved by the take-over of universities in the first place I’d like to invite you to read this one.
2nd Place
- 41 views
- 18 reads
- 11 min 9 s Member reading time
For this article unfortunately I can’t summarise the income anymore.
It depicts the changes to the format of the“Joe Rogan Experience” surrounding Joe Rogan’s latest controversies and what actually (probably could be the end result of those. Spoiler Alert: it’s not “being cancelled”!
3rd Place
The last one in the “ranks of honour”.
- 35 views
- 17 reads
- 7 min 23 s Member reading time
Here, as well, I can’t summarise the income anymore, but I remember that it was a huge chunk of my February income. I wrote this one after a recent podcast episode where Jordan Peterson talked about two new educational projects he has in the works. I introduce them and provide all the informations about them I had accessible at the time.
Bonus Article
Even though this one didn’t crack two digits in reads I still like to add it here as well. It was a very personal article that I wrote more for the means of catharsis and self-therapy as to actually think it could be very interesting for readers, hence I was even more surprised to just find out that it attracted my second highest Member reading time.
- 38 views
- 9 reads
- 42 min 52 s Member reading time
Well, the title says it all. In it I’m dealing with an experience I had as a teenager surrounding my first time. Don’t worry, it’s neither too graphic nor filled with too many details regarding the act itself. It deals more with a recent realisation I’ve had about it.
Three Lessons I take home with me
1.
My original assumption, that “Natural Followers” are more “valuable” in terms of interest in your articles and also therefore in monetary gains seems to have been confirmed, all though I keep in mind that I can only work with the little data I have so far. But it seems like I’m at least not completely wrong with my thesis. I will keep up with this analysis should I be able to get back into the Partner Program at some point.
2.
Interest in articles in temporarily delayed. I remember when I would check up my stats one hour later, two hours later and I would be disappointed that nothing has happened, yet. Instagram has ruined us all, hasn’t it, with immediate dopamine responses!
Medium is, to some degree, a slow platform. Your article has to sit there for a while before it gets taken out to a date by the algorithm.
Whenever you read through your feed, I think it’s safe to assume that at least 50% of the articles suggested to you are at least one month old, some even up to six months, at least in my feed that’s the case.
Hence I don’t care anymore if my article doesn’t “blow up” immediately, because I think that’s really a very seldom thing to be happening on Medium. Instead I realised that through publishing a wider array of articles I managed to increase overall interest and interactions as well with my articles, which means that actually time will (maybe months later) tell how “good” any given article really was considering its performance.
3.
I stick to “I write what I want to write about”. I did cover a wide range of topics, indeed. Politics, philosophy, semantics, personal stuff, celebrities, movies, series, and more. Even though I can see the beginning of a trend of some topics being more interesting for readers than others overall I’m very satisfied with the development over the last couple of months and I don’t want to pressure myself into a niche.
As I stated, I want to write because I really want to write about something, either because I deeply care about it or randomly fall over it in my mind or in my surroundings. If people like it, deem it worth reading and maybe even benefit in any way of it, that would be the cherry on top, but, as of now I think, it should never be the motivation why I write about something.
(a really short) conclusion
Writing this article has made me really feel confident about reaching 100 Followers until the end of the year. I could calculate the best case scenario, but let’s be honest, even I had enough math for today. I’m sorry that I put you through this… again… But even if I don’t, I’ll still be fine, because if I keep writing now I at least prove one thing to myself (and on a side-note to the world): I write, because I really love it!
