There is a lot more to making money on Medium. You have very little control over it.

I have over 2K followers and my articles have over 25K views in August alone. My most popular piece has about 100K views and is a top story on Startup.

I have been a top writer in different categories. I have published about 150 articles, many were curated.

I am not a great writer, but I am probably average.

I don’t submit to publications any longer because so I find it doesn’t matter, but they ask to run my stories so I will add them on a first-come, first-served basis. In the past, I heavily promoted on social media where I had 10K followers. I had a mail list.

Now, you would think all that means I made decent money.

Nope.

Here’s the thing. Unless Medium distributes your work, it won’t stand a chance. You can’t get your work noticed on social media and I couldn’t even BUY promotion. An exception is if you get in a big publication and your story goes viral, but that’s probably never going to happen.

Medium’s blessing is all that matters.

I stopped writing on Medium because the return was so low. When they offered the $200 guarantee, I started writing again ONLY because they are also promoting my articles.

You should also know that some social media platforms won’t let you promote your work and will sandbox your posts (I am looking at you, Twitter.) This is why I rarely write about politics anymore because I could not get Twitter to stop shadow banning me. That 100K article? It’s been shared by different people 10 times on Twitter and hidden every time. It has 300 views.

It’s worthwhile now with the guarantee, but when Medium stops promoting my work, I will stop writing regular articles. I don’t want to spend my time promoting my work, I want to write. I would have paid a bigger membership fee if Medium would have offered promoted work as a tier.

And it’s stupid that they don’t automatically do this for every writer who earns a top writer badge.

Medium needs to invest in its writers and hasn’t done dso until now.