Why I (Deliberately) Haven’t Monetized My Medium Account To Date
It may stand in defiance to some people’s idea of conventional logic, but I don’t see this account as part of my monetization plan
Many in my social and professional network have become acquainted to seeing me share Medium links.
I’ve been an active user of this platform for two years now.
During that time, I’ve written nearly 300 posts spanning everything from how to set up a virtual number the DIY way (my first post!) through to posts intended to promote my business and information intended to help other freelance writers.
My publication about freelance writing:
My thought leadership publication is content marketing on behalf of my writing business:
A couple of my friends have expressed surprise and sometimes even incredulity that I don’t monetize my Medium writings.
Because the “monetize everything” drumbeat reverberates a lot louder than the “do it for fun” one, I wanted to share why — up until this point — I’ve taken this decision.
(Because it’s always possible that I will change my mind, I’m explaining the decision I have taken up to the time of this writing.)
Why I Post On Medium
To explain why I don’t monetize my Medium account, let me explain why I do write here in the first place.
In general, I’m a huge advocate for self-hosted and open source software. Of course, Medium isn’t this. But so long as I can keep a backup copy of my writing here (I’m very careful to do so!), I’m happy to entrust my writing to a platform that I don’t manage even though, in doing so, I realize that I’m forsaking the benefits that could accrue by posting on my own website.
(Caveat for my fellow backup fiends: when you’re backing up your Medium writing, be aware that — at the time of writing — the images remain locked up in the CDN. So you’ll want to back those up separately. One way to do this would be to draft your posts elsewhere before publishing on Medium).
Posting on Medium allows me to publish on a platform that’s:
- Professionally hosted. Think: extremely limited downtime. When sharing my writing, I also don’t have to share my personal domain which hosts other material.
- Lighting fast. While I generally have good things to say about my host, drafting writing on my self-hosted Wordpress blog (which sits behind Cloudflare) is just a lot slower than writing on Medium which is almost always an extremely fluid experience. Because I draft most of my writing directly on the internet, I really hate even small lags as they slow down my ‘flow’. So long as my internet is reliable, I find drafting in Medium as fast as drafting on a word processor. The UI is also very minimalist which allows me to focus on my writing and not get distracted by buttons I don’t need.
- Audience centric: I love the fact that Medium makes it easy to build an audience through its social profiles-and-followers design. Sure, I could do the same thing by adding an opt-in box after my writing on my site. But the options aren’t mutually exclusive. Seeing my audience slowly build up over time is also encouraging. It’s also nice to be able to see who has engaged with my writing enough to click the follow button. Rolling out these features on a blog that I self-host would be, if not impossible, certainly very challenging.
- Got everything I need: In order to author writing that reaches and influences, I really only need a few things. A WYSIWYG text editor — and Medium’s is a delight to use; hosting that’s reliable (see above): and, ideally, a statistics dashboard so that I can see what writing is trending. The last provides a feedback loop so that I can see what’s resonating and what’s not. Medium provides all of these things in one very easy to use package.
The Benefits of Posting Here: Inbound Marketing And An Audience
I post on Medium to share my thoughts with the world. For me, in light of the above, Medium is the most efficient and enjoyable way of doing that. I currently receive in the region of 30K views per month to my writing here. To my mind, this is a significant audience reach that I’m eager to grown even further.
I write on Medium in order to leverage an easy way to reach an audience.
And through maximizing my audience reach, I can:
- Ensure that the content marketing I share here (the minority of my posts) reaches the widest possible audience in order to be as effective as possible. Because even the best content marketing isn’t very effective if nobody’s reading it.
- Ensure that my personal material — everything else! — also reaches the widest possible audience. The (sometimes unexpected) results of this have been everything from backlinks to my personal site through to radio appearances after producers discovered my content.
On the flip side:
If I paywall my content by attempting to monetize it, I substantially reduce the size of my potential audience because internet users that might discover my content organically possibly either aren’t premium Medium members or will have exceeded their monthly free article quota. The result of either: my writing won’t get read by anybody but the minority of web users who pay for a premium Medium sub.
Sure, I can share the friend link in order to bypass the paywall, but it’s the original link that indexes in Google. The organic discoverability of my writing therefore plummets way down.
What this means, in simple terms, is that by not placing it behind a paywall the writing I post on Medium which gets indexed in Google — and because Medium is a high-DR site it tends to rank highly for keywords — can be seen by as many people as possible.
I don’t advocate writing for exposure in order to develop professionally or accrue clips (I have plenty of those). But I think that if you’re writing for fun or to share ideas — as I mostly am here — then it makes sense to attempt to get your writing read by as wide a group of readers as possible.
What’s the point of writing content that nobody ever reads?
Inbound Leads Are A Lot More Valuable To Me Than Medium Payments
The second reason I would give if you asked me why I haven’t monetized my Medium writings — again, at least until now — is that the money on offer isn’t enough to entice me to do so.
Furthermore, it seems to me that if you’re attempting to approach Medium as a channel to be monetized, you need to publish here:
- As frequently as possible. Not that I don’t write here quite often, but to date, I haven’t set out to write at a certain frequency just to write for the sake of writing. In my opinion, this is almost certain to eventually lead to cluttering up the internet by creating useless writing.
- In a clickbaity style. Because I don’t publish here for money, I write the way I want to write. Sure, it’s great if people discover my writing. But I don’t need to use things like clickbait headlines in order to maximize clickthroughs and views. Because I’m focused on reaching as wide an audience as possible and on discoverability, my main concern is with sharing authentically — and hopefully conveying useful information.
Everything I have read affirms my belief that — minus a very select few — most Medium writers earn relatively little money through their attempts to monetize their platform.
However, if I share content here that results in an inbound business lead that ultimately converts to become a client:
- I could sign up a client on a $1,000 monthly retainer and make $12,000 from that client over the course of a year
- A book ghostwriting my client could discover one of my posts on this topic and sign me on for a book deal. Five figures or above.
For Me, Audience Value Exceeds Likely Monetization Potential
The cost-benefit analysis I have outlined above has led me to believe that it’s wise to resist the temptation I inevitably sometimes feel (when I receive claps that could be earning me money) to monetize my Medium profile.
Through making it very easy to draft writing in a great user interface that is hosted on reliable infrastructure, Medium has made it possible for me to both write quite prodigiously and to get my writing in front of readers.
For me, both at the time of writing and up to this point, the benefits of this have outweighed the money I might be making by putting this writing behind a paywall.
— With thanks to and for creating this platform.
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