Five Bucks per Month

Is that bar too low?

What does it take to break even on Medium? I know many come to this platform expecting to make five and six-figure incomes.

I have a friend who left the Medium Partner Program after trying for a couple of years and failing to reach his goal of several thousand dollars per month. I don’t know what level his earnings reached, but I don’t think he got into the $100/month club. He worked hard at it, too. He published several hundred stories. He even became a top writer in several categories and had many stories curated.

I know others who live abroad who are ineligible for the Partner Program because the payment system is not available in their countries. It doesn’t seem fair that they get nothing for the fine stories they contribute.

I also know excellent writers who have made serious money offline but have not yet joined the $100 per month club here on Medium.

As for me, I have a low achievement goal: $5 per month — enough to cover the cost of my membership. However, last month is the first month in almost a year that I’ve ended up in the black.

The problem is not Medium’s — well, not all of it. I just haven’t written as much as in those early months of the COVID-19 lockdown. Back then I even had a few months in the double-digit earnings (whoopee, right?). I enjoyed writing much more then. Maybe the newness of everything: Medium, Covid, writing every day, and seeing my words getting read by others made the difference. I took my wiring seriously and worked hard at it. I had little else to do. The Covid bug kept us all indoors and away from each other.

Writing helped me stay connected. It still does. It gave me a way to “get out,” so to speak. Not that I got out that much before Covid, but when you have to mask up and wear rubber gloves to buy groceries (yeah, I did that). And sneak out to the store at six-a-gosh-awful O’clock in the morning. . . I even wrote a poem about it — a senryu:

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