People have been shitting on Medium a lot recently, arguing that if you want to make a living from writing, you should try somewhere else.
This might as well be true. I have been here for less than two years, and the algorithm has already changed countless times. To this day, I’m actually not sure how you’re supposed to get visibility — and consequently money.
Since I’ve been here, whether you get paid on Medium or not has been related to anything from the quality of your content, to how much you interact with other contributors, how many claps you get, how many comments, whether you have more than 100 followers, or the number of articles you push out every month.
I never relied on Medium as a source of income. I started writing on here because I had read somewhere that if you wanted to get more exposure as an online writer, you should stop wasting time on your personal blog and start writing on an already established platform. Medium came up a lot in the recommendations, so I thought I would give it a go.
Honestly, I’ve been loving it.
I love that anyone is welcome here, and that you can read articles by internationally-published authors, established New York Times journalists, as well as… me.
I’ve used this platform as an opportunity to put more effort into my writing. I wanted to know if anyone beside my mum would actually read what I write.
I dipped my toes cautiously in the beginning, then jumped in head first and challenged myself to write every day for 30 days. I’m now planning to post two articles a week for the month of March.
The first time I got paid I wasn’t even expecting it.
But after YEARS of writing online (I started blogging when I was 15) and building an extensive portfolio of personal records that nobody read, I was used to writing for my own entertainment only.
So when — on September 6th, 2021 — $0.60 was deposited in my bank account, I was ECSTATIC.
