How Much Medium Paid Me for 8,800 Views on a Single Story

Clue: It’s way more than I expected

I started writing for Medium on 30 October last year. The story with 8,800 views (so far) was published on 4 November. That makes it one of my earliest stories. It’s still the most successful one even almost 4 months later.

I write every day, as that gives me the best chance for my stories to take off. The more stories I publish, the more chance of one of them going viral. Medium is a numbers game.

Number of views

Here’s the story that got 8,800 views. Have a read before you continue. See if you can figure out what made it so successful.

Here’s How Much I Earned From Writing 8 Kindle Books

Luckily for me, 92% of the views were internal. Those are the views that count. The external views came from a wide variety of sources.

What matters for earnings though is member reading time

As you can see from the above screenshot, this story has amassed member reading time of 114 hrs 44 mins. Not too shabby. I hope it goes on to get much higher reading time in the coming months.

Why this story?

When I started writing for Medium I didn’t consider myself to be a writer. I didn’t have much idea what to write about, and in the early days, I struggled to come up with ideas of what to write.

I decided to write about what I’m most passionate about, which is making money from side hustles. One of my successful side hustles from the past was writing Kindle books, so I decided to write about that.

It’s nothing spectacular. It’s just a straightforward story of how I came to write the books, how much money I made from them, and related details.

I think it became popular because there are many writers on this platform. Most of them want to earn money from their writing, so this was an ideal story for them. If you’re a writer, why wouldn’t you want to read about how much someone made from writing books for Kindle?

I wrote a related post about writing a Kindle book in just 4 days. That story is also doing pretty well.

I Wrote A Kindle Book In Just 4 Days, With These Results

So, how much did Medium pay me?

As you can see above, the story has earned me $405.18 so far. Hopefully, the story will keep getting views and reads and reach the magic $1,000.

I’ve learned a lot writing here over the last few months so I’m hoping that I can get a few more stories like this over the coming months and years.

If you’re just starting, I hope this gives you some inspiration. I went from not being a writer to earning over $400 for a single story.

If I can do this, pretty much anyone can. I’m just a normal guy sitting on my sofa writing stories.