My First Six Months on Medium
I’m undecided. Is this a writing or social media site?
Medium claims to be a writing site that offers its readers great articles in exchange for a monthly subscription. Authors in turn are promised valuable earnings for producing quality articles.
As a secondary activity, writers are also encouraged to be readers and engage with others by commenting, highlighting, and clapping on articles they like.
And it turns out this is key.
At first glance, the Medium offer sounded good, so I signed up for a year. Over the first three months, my earnings were like a see-saw, up and down with no particular pattern.
I wondered why some month’s payouts were high, yet in others, the balance barely moved above zero. The answer seemed to be that I needed to do more highlighting, commenting, and clapping to maximize my earnings.
Earnings are definitely affected by engagement here.
The precise way that Medium measures engagement is a well-kept secret. They don’t want to reveal the details because otherwise, some would try to game the system.
As my engagement has increased so have my earnings.
Making comments intuitively feels like a good way to show genuine interest in an…
