This Will Be My Only Story About Medium

My husband and I love Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and they sing this song called “This is my Last Song About Satan.” Well, this will be my only story about Medium. The meat of the article boils down to — write on the platform because you love writing and want to find your audience.

For readers who are used to reading about something more useful, I apologize — I’ll be publishing more work of my usual ilk later today. I just need to get this one off my chest.

For writers that want to use Medium to make money — I wish you luck. Apparently, this platform has managed to make a lot of money for writers and that’s awesome! But that has not been my experience at all. But I’m also vaguely surprised at how many people are angry they don’t make over $100 a month consistently. I’ve made $100 on Medium in a month exactly never.

For additional weirdness, people are treating me like I make some kind of ‘living’ here and I owe them something because of that ‘living’. I’ve gotten emails picking apart my work and insulting me. What’s terrible about those emails is I don’t make enough money from this platform to be treated that way. What’s great about those emails is that they make the emails I get that engage with me as a person that much better!

While I am always grateful for people reading my work, the idea that I could make a sustainable living off of $30 a month in the US is laughable.

The only way I make money writing on Medium is by leveraging it for freelance projects — I use the portfolio I’ve built here to help land those.

If you’re a writer and you have it in your head that people with a following of x make a lot of money on this platform, I have news for you — it’s the wrong reason to write here.

There are my earnings, from a year. I’m grateful for the money, it’s better than nothing! But it proves that much like the rich economy of America, the rich economy of Medium does nothing to serve me.

The times I’ve had to interact with Medium for support, they’ve given me little mind, taking several weeks to respond. Medium has made it more than clear that this is just a platform, and they are happy to take my work — but giving information about what my readers read about isn’t something they give to people with audiences the size of mine.

In other words — just because my audience feels big to me doesn’t mean that Medium cares about me (or, I suspect, the audience). And that’s ok — I’m writing here so that I can get my words out there, and hopefully make meaningful connections with my readers.

Write on Medium, like anywhere else, because you enjoy it. The rest will follow — but for most people on this platform, the ‘rest’ won’t be money, just opportunity.

I’ll be making the most of that!