The problems with much of the audience is not that they do monetization, but how they do it.
Like many readers, I don't read enough Medium articles to pay $5/mo for it. I don't mind paying $5/mo for something useful, or sending a one-time donation. I gladly would pay, say, 25-50¢ for a good article, if I could do it without subscription. Such a commitment just feels unnecessary.
One way to do it is ads — good thing Medium is not pushing ads at me! My thanks. But there's still no easy way to pay a small amount.
I see how microtransactions are not economical. I wish Medium offered a "casual reader" plan, where I post, say, $10, and they go to pay per-article fees, not limited by time, that is, I'd not need to replenish it monthly if I haven't run into zero balance. This could be a gateway for more readers who just don't see the need to commit to a subscription. It could even lead to more conversions to subscribers.
There are some unique approaches to this idea of casual viewing. I know Coil (https://coil.com/) is doing this with the whole idea of Web 3.0.
The idea, if I understand correctly, is you pay $5 a month for a membership, and any time you consume content from someone who has set up a coil wallet, part of your subscription goes to them. Like Medium subscriptions, but for the entire web.
The problem right now is no isn’t really an incentive to use it. It’s all volunteer based. So the payouts from it are pennies.
Websites would need to have Coil-only content that only members would get to see to incentivize adoption, similar to Patreon. But since it’s decentralized, it’s up to each site to implement it.
That's impressive. I'm clearly writing the wrong articles haha.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been posting flamewar comments repeatedly, and that's not what this site is for, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
If your views are coming from mainly external sources, Medium won't pay you for that.
Also, Medium pays more for more recent stories. Probably as an incentive to keep posting more articles. 1 hour of readership for a brand new story could get you $2-5. For an older story, it'll probably only earn you less than a dollar.
Dev.to is flagged by default on HN.
Do you use it? And if so, how do you like it?
I didn't want people to think I was just writing this to get attention which is why I didn't originally post it.
Here's proof to the claims I made: https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...
For readers who aren't subscribed to Medium, it can be annoying. You go to read an article, and if that article is monetized, you see a banner to sign up. Plenty of people leave immediately.
Now let me tell why, as a writer, I still use Medium and will continue for the time being.
I only post 2-4 articles on there per month. But even then, I'm seeing ~50K views per month and this month I'm on track to earn $1000.
To see those same results on my own blog, I would need to learn a lot about SEO, affiliate marketing, and have a large Twitter following to direct traffic to my blog. I would also need to maintain it myself.
Sure, I might have a higher chance of going viral on HN, but how likely is that even anyway?
As a full-time developer with a newborn who's just looking to earn some fun money, Medium is perfect. I write, submit to a publication, and they take care of the rest.
People may say, "I'm not going to read your posts on Medium." My answer is: okay? Can't make everyone happy. But I'm still getting 50K views from people who do want to read them, and I'm okay with that.
The other point to make is that Medium only pays for views/reads from other Medium members, so I don't necessarily care if I go viral on HN or not. If I really cared about going viral, I would just post my article to something like dev.to and then submit it to HN.
If you're just looking to write and get views/go viral and don't care about money, then it might not make sense to post to Medium. But if you want to earn some money with relatively little effort, Medium is hard to beat.
Edit: Here's proof of my claims for people questioning them (https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...). Note: it is a Medium link to an unlisted post. Didn't know where else to put it.