$7.23 Earned For 21 Minutes Of Reading Time on Medium

There must be more to earnings than just reading time

It’s always assumed that we earn money depending on how many minutes of reading time our stories have received. But there must be more to it than that.

Today I discovered another huge anomaly in my earnings for one particular article.

The article was my second highest earner last month and is my highest earner this month.

It was published on 11 February. On day 1 it had 11 minutes of reading time and earned $0.27.

The highest read time was on 8 March. It amassed a read time of 3 hr 29 min and earned $7.61.

Yesterday, the reading time was the lowest it’s been since the day it was published. Reading time was just 21 minutes.

Based on previous earnings I would have expected it to earn maybe $0.54.

But it earned $7.23.

So for the second-lowest amount of reading time, I got the second-highest earnings.

So I’m assuming there is more that goes into the earnings calculation than just the reading time.

I’ve noticed anomalies like this over and over. Some articles earn consistently more than others that have a similar reading time. I also noticed that stories with higher views receive disproportionately more earnings than those with lower views.

This story has the 3rd highest views of all my 186 stories, so is it getting some kind of bonus for high views?

It also has a lot of claps and comments. Is there some kind of bonus for that?

Whatever is going on here, there must be more to the earnings than pure reading time.