I Published 75 Medium Posts and Made $267

TL;DR: One saved Partner Program page, 75 posts, $267 in displayed whole-dollar earnings. The spread between the top of that list and the bottom is the only reader survey I’ve ever run where every answer came back priced.

I pulled a saved page off my Medium Partner Program account on April 20, 2024, and scrolled a column of dollar amounts that ran seventy-five rows deep.

Two hundred sixty-seven dollars. Whole numbers, no cents displayed. The best one paid $35, and eleven of them showed zero, which puts them financially even with a thought I had in the shower and never wrote down.

Medium paid exactly what the attention produced. I’m not filing a complaint about the arithmetic.

I can’t leave the file alone because most creator advice is a clean theory with the receipts cropped out, and that’s the whole goddamn con. Here are mine.

The top of the ledger had a wrench in its hand

Thirty-five dollars for “Byte-Sized Brilliance: Why Short-Form Writing Reigns Supreme in 2024,” twenty-four for “How I Produce Quick, Consistent, Helpful Content,” seventeen for “5 Techniques to Hook Readers in the Opening Sentence,” fourteen for an atomic-newsletter piece, twelve for a newsletter blueprint, nine for a writing tip, and that is every post on the list that cleared eight dollars, the whole winning column read out in one breath. All six gave the reader something to go do on Tuesday.

Nobody paid me to admire the moon. They paid for help with the job sitting in front of them, and short-form work, production, hooks, newsletters, audience, and tools crowd the whole upper end of that list.

The winning titles make a compact promise. They name the object and the use, and a reader can tell what happens after the click.

A number and a socket set won’t save a bad headline on their own. Fog costs money. I paid retail.

Eleven posts earned nothing

“The Essence of Minimalism in Writing,” “The Power of Free,” “The Art of Monetizing Your Passions,” “The Creative Muse: How AI Can Inspire Your Writing,” “Future-Proof Your Career,” “From Corporate Chains to Creative Freedom.”

I wrote every one of those, and I’d take some of those subjects up again tomorrow. The titles arrived pre-smoothed. You hear the phrase before you hear the writer.

“Future-proof your career” sounds important and says damn near nothing. Which career, against what future, paid for by who. “Creative freedom” has been handled by so many people the lettering wore off the coin.

The ledger punished abstraction, and it punished twice as hard when the abstraction showed up in the platform’s own house voice, because Medium already carried ten thousand pieces on the digital detox and the profitable passion and the escape from corporate chains, and mine walked into that choir and found out nobody buys a ticket to hear one more mouth make the same vowel.

I sang it anyway. Eleven times, for free.

Voice paid when it carried a position

“Becoming a Niche of One” and “What Is a Niche of One?” each pulled $8. “I Hate Your Stupid Inspirational Quotes” made $4 and beat a stack of proper instructional work while doing it.

Lists and how-to pieces had the obvious edge. A Medium reader spots utility in half a second and doesn’t have to be talked into it.

But a personal piece can slip somebody a tool, or a name for a thing they’ve been carrying around without one, or the relief of hearing one honest sentence out loud. A tutorial can leak the writer’s obsessions and scars right through the numbered steps.

The line that mattered in my ledger ran between specific work and generic intention. I didn’t work that out on my own. I read it off the money.

Thirty-eight posts came in at a dollar or less

Six posts cleared $8. Sixty-nine split what was left of the $267.

That averages $3.56 a post, and the average is a liar. The top six drag it away from what publishing the other sixty-nine felt like, and the median sat down around a dollar and stayed there. Thirty-eight rows sat at or under it.

This is the ordinary shape of platform money. A few pieces catch distribution or search or member reading time or an editor in a good mood, and the long tail lies on the floor pretending it came for the carpet.

Volume did work for me, though. Seventy-five swings gave me enough failures to quit arguing from mood.

I could see clusters in it. Writing process paid and newsletter mechanics paid, while vague self-improvement and generic AI optimism and broad declarations about freedom all went home empty.

That account page was a reader interview conducted in nickels.

The hourly rate is the number creator advice leaves out

If Partner Program revenue was the product, then no, it wasn’t worth it. Run the hours against $267 and you get a number that would make a poor bastard delivering papers in the rain feel overpaid.

The posts trained my pace, stocked ideas I stole from myself later, tested titles, reached people, and walked me into the territory that became Niche of One. Those are real. Creators grab for them the second the cash number embarrasses them, and that grab is where the bullshit starts, so the $267 stays on the table right next to the list of benefits.

Medium loaned me distribution I didn’t own and a laboratory where any piece could fail in public for pocket change. That trade held up until I knew what I was looking for. After that I was paying rent on an audience with somebody else’s name on the mailbox.

I wouldn’t run the experiment again at that size. I’d take the six or eight signals, build heavier work on top of them, and haul the reader somewhere I hold the deed to.

The eleven zeroes can stay in the ledger where they are. They paid me in a different currency and a good bit of it was counterfeit, which I reckon is its own kind of tuition.

I saved that page in April of 2024 and I’ve gone back to it more than I’ve gone back to any of the seventy-five.

Sources

• Joe Forrest’s Medium Partner Program export, saved April 20, 2024
• Medium Help Center: Partner Program earnings

Frequently asked questions

How much did the 75 Medium posts earn?

The saved export displays $267 in whole-dollar amounts. The highest individual post earned $35.

How many posts earned nothing?

Eleven showed $0. Thirty-eight of the 75 came in at $1 or under.

What topics performed best?

Concrete writing advice, content production, hooks, newsletters, and clearly stated creator problems dominated the top of the ledger.