And I’m thrilled.
Medium sent me a handy email and text that they deposited money in my account. Yeah! They paid me $0.40. Boo!
I actually feel pretty good about it.
Why?
—you might be saying
I am playing the long game. All of us are. When I speak of “us” I am talking about writers. I am a writer. There’s a bunch of us here on Medium. This is my platform of choice. I subscribe to their content for a whopping $5 a month.
Ok, so back to being thrilled about 40 cents?!
My biggest article earned all of those whopping $0.40 and got 210 views. It was posted on January 24th. So it’s only been up for a few days. Interesting, it’s already earned $0.33 this month, and it’s only six days into February.
Read the article…
My
Son was Killed by his Mother
In that same span, I have gone from zero to 85 followers. It’s not thousands, but it’s a 850% increase. I’ll take it!
That gets to the heart of why I am thrilled. I can look back at the start and see the rate of improvement. The month before, I received $0.22 from Medium. That means that my earnings have almost doubled. It’s an increase of 82%!
What’s more, this is a passive income source. I put in the time to write my articles, and they will keep earning until the end of time. It isn’t much right now, but the snowball is building…
Of course, this isn’t truly passive. Content grows stale over time. In 2021, people will likely dismiss the article as “last year’s news.” That stings because the article describes my experience with the murder of my son. But, what are you gonna do? I try to keep my content current.
The Power of the Snowball
Maybe some of my other articles will start to get traction. That would be cool. So far I’ve gotten mostly zero reads. There’s some freedom in that. I can write whatever the heck I want and not think about anybody else.
Yeah, let’s look on the bright side.
If I make $0.80 next month then I’ll be even better. That will be “proof” to me that this Medium thing might work. If it doubles each month, in a few short months it will equal real money!
Remember the lesson about compound interest. Would you rather have $1 million dollars, or a penny that doubles every day one year? The answer, of course, is the penny. The greater lesson is patience. It is only on day 28 that the doubling-penny beats the million dollars. From there, the results are staggering. At the end, the doubling-penny is $10,000,000!
The person in our magical example had to have some serious patience. For 27 days, he or she had a raw deal. Only the wise would have held firm.
I’m a nerd. I like my spreadsheets. I just ran a theoretical “hopeful earnings” sheet. I assumed (hopefully) that my earning will double each month. It is decent for year one, but crazy cool in year two. I don’t want to jinx anything by actually giving the number, but it’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one place. Ever.
Expect one of these here earning reports each month for the foreseeable future.
February target: $0.88!
Matt McCabe
February 6, 2020
Matt writes on a variety of topics on Medium and his own blog. He writes about Weight Loss, Movies, Travel, Writing, Serial Fiction, Grief/Trauma, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Productivity, and Life Hacks. He is a christian on The Way. He can be found on his blog: mwmccabe.com