Comment

Comment on For folks who write for Medium.com, what's your engagement like, and how much do you make?

The thing about medium is that it’s a trusted domain + mailing list + blog + search engine in one. All you have to do is sign up and start writing, for free.

Sure you can have your own domain, and spin up a cheap VPS which has WordPress or other blogging software, pay MailChimp to actually inbox your emails, use Google Analytics or some open source complex privacy-focused analytics, and then set up your advertisements if you actually want to make money from it. That’s a lot of time invested and very expensive relatively (compared to free).

source

Sort:hotnew top

Wxfisch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

source
- agent_flounder@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Unless you’re writing some insanely great shit about a ridiculously popular topic or you majorly luck out somehow, it stands no chance of getting huge. It’s like sports stars. For every one of those there’s tens or hundreds of thousands that nobody will ever hear about.
  
  Or maybe I just suck and I’m bitter lol. My website was doing like 11k visits a month, max, at one point. I think I got like 2 checks from Google in five years. Enough for two fancy date nite dinners.
  
  source
  - Synnr@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Nope, that’s about standard or even better than most, unless you’re doing it full-time.
    
    source
- Synnr@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Unless you’re making more than $16 each month (most are not making anywhere close to that) from Medium then you’re just choosing another company to profit off of you. It’s also more work and takes a lot (arguably, depending on your technical comfort level) more time.
  
  Do you own the content that you publish on Medium?
  
  Yes. Everything you publish on Medium, that is rightfully yours, belongs to you and you can republish, delete or choose to convert it into other forms without worrying about anything because Medium gives you the ownership. They have clearly explained this in the Medium terms of service.
  
  Medium (company) might use your content to redistribute, translate or modify, and they need your permission for this. They need licensing for this because of the Medium rule; “You own your content”
  
  Medium is like an ocean in part because it’s so easy and free. There are some really spectacular fish and animals and rare finds and even shipwrecks full of gold and treasure. There is also a metric shit-ton of mediocrity.
  
  source