Medium’s External Views Dilemma: How Much Are You Losing
Probably A Lot
Probably A Lot
I usually write about self-improvement, Taoism, or spiritual guidance and while I do throw in funny writing exercises from time to time, I try to stay mostly on brand.
However, I’m starting to become worried about writing for Medium due to external views.
A Number of Problems
About two weeks ago, I was accepted into the Medium Partner Program AND the Flipboard Creator Program on nearly the same day. One of these programs pays you for views, the other does not, but it CAN drive thousands of views.
For those who don’t know, Flipboard is a content curation platform with 140 million monthly users worldwide. The app can drive an insane amount of traffic to any website if the article is well-received on the network.
For example, on April 7th, I published an article titled “How to Deal with Hateful Christians.” Within 24 hours, the article reached over 1,000 views and hundreds of reads. By today, April 10th, the article reached nearly 2,000 views and 665 reads. A read means someone scrolled all the way through the article to the bottom of the page.
Remember, MPP only pays out for the amount of time another MPP member reads your article. So, how much have I made so far for my article? $1.38. This is because out of 2,000 views, only 40 of them were internal (coming from Medium). Out of those 40, the MPP member reading time was 58 minutes which equals $1.38.
I’m at a loss for words. Google Ads Sense, which Medium won’t allow writers to run on their blogs, would have paid somewhere between $8–$20 per 1,000 views. Yes, there are a ton of factors because of content type, viewership, click-through rate, and so on. I only have to go on what Google gives me.
So, my total loss for that article is $15–$39 had it been run on a personal blog and pulled in the same viewership with Ad Sense turned on.
The really sad part is one of the writers for my publication has an article with over 4,000 views. Meaning they are missing $36–$80 because we aren’t able to run ads and properly monetize those hits from social media.
Publications Make It Worse
In the last 10 days, The Taoist Online articles have been viewed 19,818 times. If we use Google’s estimations, my writers and I have lost between $160-$400. Even if I divided $160 (the low estimate) evenly between all 7 writers that released an article in April, that’s $22 PER WRITER. If I divided it based on the percentage of views each writer’s article gained, my star writer from above would have received at least $65 for only 10 days' worth of views.
Possible Solutions
Referrals and Tips — Medium’s solution to its own problem is to allow us to monetize through referral links. If a reader signs up to be a Medium subscriber, you’ll receive $2.17 every month directly from that user. This is a great idea and can bring in huge amounts of revenue IF you can convince your readers to use it. You can also add other CTA (call to action) links at the bottom or around your post. Except I’ve been in contact with writers who are much more popular than me, and those donations and referrals are nearly non-existent. My writing team deserves to have the quality of work they are putting out be monetized more than what Medium is capable of.
Change Website — We could move our articles to another website, which allows for better monetization, but I love the Medium community. It’s the best one around for writers and I owe it to everyone who has subscribed to me to stay.
Cross Post — If most of my traffic is coming from social media, I could cross-post articles to a personal website that could display traditional ads. Then, I could continue to post on Medium as a way to drive traffic to the other website AND continue to gain funds through MPP. This might be the most logical (although most clunky) solution.
I wish it was possible to only use Medium for generating revenue. But without the ability to take publications or external views into account with revenue, then we have to make a choice between writing about our passions for a single cup of coffee a month, or actually being able to make a good side-living off of it.
Why can’t we do both, here?
