My Medium Earnings and Results - January 2024

By Learning Pages | Learning Blog | 2 Mar 2024

December was my first month as a ‘Friend of Medium’, and the results were amazing. January’s earnings started off well but then plummeted, and February’s crashed…

Friend of Medium

In early December, there was a lot of interaction from other writers. This started reducing after the beginning of January, and the enthusiasm seemed to disappear in February.

Since being a Friend of Medium, I have had:

More interactions without reads,
More single claps,
More one or two-word comments,
More AI-generated comments,
My mailbox twice flooded with 20–30 emails within a day of subscribing to receive notifications of an author’s new stories,
An increase in my user name being mentioned — along with dozens of other writers — in the same story.
An increase in my stories being added to lists.

Graphs and Statistics

The statistics appeared to be random. This made it difficult to make conclusions other than stories have the most reads soon after publication.

Here are my graphs and statistics up to and including January:

Followers

There has been a noticeable increase in followers since upgrading to Friend of Medium.

Monthly Views and Reads

Notice the significant increase after upgrading to ‘Friend of Medium’ in December, the decrease during January and the greater decrease in February.

Last August, Medium put a “temporary hold” on the Reads statistics. They returned last December, so I decided to fill in the previous months’ gaps. When I did this, I noticed that the monthly number of views and reads had decreased by at least 20% compared to the previously published 30-day figures.

Daily Views and Reads

The read-to-view ratio was 47% for this month. Last month’s was 52%.

Earnings compared to Subscription

December’s earnings were my highest since I became a Medium Partner. January’s earnings were lower (65% of the previous month’s). They were still higher than any pre-FoM earnings., but were only slightly higher than the break-even target.

February’s earnings fell below the monthly target. The daily average was $0.22. It needs to be $0.42 to break even.

You will have noticed that I raised the subscription and the monthly earnings targets. This is because I upgraded to ‘Friend of Medium’.

My subscription expires in March, so I needed to make a ‘prorated’ payment of $27.87 to become a ‘Friend of Medium’. This made the cost of my subscription $177.87 for this subscription year.

If I am to break even in the next subscription year, my earnings will need to be $12.50 ($150/12) a month or more.

FoM Earnings

This graph is a close-up view of earnings for my first year as a member. The earnings shot up when I became a “Friend of Medium” in December, but they plummeted in January and crashed in February.