The Ultimate Guide to Earning Money from Medium.com Articles

Medium is a fantastic platform for a lot of bloggers. It doesn’t have some of the benefits of having your own domain, controlling your own hosting, and running your own version of WordPress. But it more than makes up for those with the audience and exposure it can bring to the table, and you can make some money from it.

How much money can you make? It’s easy enough to find posts about making $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month, or more. Medium’s own Partner Program data has shown the highest single-author monthly earnings reaching nearly $50,000 and the highest single-story earnings topping $16,000. Now, not everyone will make that much money - the average monetized post earns around $1.20 and only about 6.4% of authors earn $100 or more per month - but for writers who build an audience and publish consistently, the earning potential is real.

Strategies for Making Money

There are two primary ways you can make money on Medium, though there’s plenty of different techniques and paths you can take within each of the two.

The first option is to go with the traditional monetization for blogging: selling things on your website. You can use a Medium blog as your company blog and frequently link to your own website for promotional purposes. Traffic referred to your site can land on landing pages or in other parts of your sales funnel; they can then go on to buy your product or service, hire you for consulting, or whatever else it is you offer.

The second option is to go with Medium’s built-in monetization; that’s right: Medium lets you monetize the views and engagement you get on their site, though it has some idiosyncrasies to it. But it exists and it can earn you a decent chunk of change each month. Check out our complete list of blog monetization techniques for more ideas you can apply alongside this.

Note: if you were previously using Medium for affiliate marketing, that ship has sailed. Medium discontinued its affiliate program on August 1, 2023. You can still link out to your own site and products. But the third-party affiliate link angle is no longer a viable primary strategy on this platform the way it once was.

Of course, combining both methods is the play. Why limit yourself to just one when you can take advantage of both with the right setup?

Also, to help with a common question about the rules: Medium does not allow third-party advertising, sponsored content, or banner-style ad images embedded in posts. You can link to your own site and products. But you can’t run Google Ads or similar programs through your Medium posts. Always check Medium’s latest rules directly on their site, as these policies have changed over the years and may continue to evolve.

Monetizing Through Medium Itself

If you’re in a country Stripe doesn’t support, then you’ll sadly be out of luck.

The way the system works is pretty easy.

• You join Medium as an author. Anyone can do this; every account on Medium has the ability to publish content, there is no difference between a casual reader or an author account.
• You join the Medium Partner Program. I’ll discuss a bit more about what this means in a moment.
• You write a good piece of content. It doesn’t really matter what the content is about, so long as it’s high quality. It can be short or long, funny or serious, unbiased or opinionated - it just needs to abide by Medium’s content rules.
• On your published content, enable distribution and earnings. This allows your content to be monetized.

Normally, content won’t receive attention without some promotion. You can circulate it on social media, link to it in other blogs, and generally promote it yourself. Medium also has a curation system where staff and editors can surface strong content to wider audiences, which is the equivalent of making it to the front page of Medium.

Medium’s monetization works differently from many other publishing platforms. Many other publishing places run advertising and give you a cut of what your content earns, a system that is notoriously fickle and low paying. Medium doesn’t run advertising, so you don’t have to contend with that scheme.

Instead, Medium operates on a subscription model. Readers pay $5 per month or $50 per year for a Medium membership, which gives them unlimited access to all paywalled content. Free readers hit a limit on how many member-only stories they can read each month before being prompted to subscribe.

This is relevant, because this is how your content earns money. When a paying member reads and engages with your monetized content, you earn a part of their subscription fee. That $5 monthly fee gets distributed across the monetized stories a member reads and engages with in a given month. The exact amount you earn is based on a few things, like read time and engagement.

To give you a basic picture of what to expect: according to Medium’s own Partner Program data, about 48% of enrolled authors earn something, the average monthly earnings sit around $77, and roughly 10.6% of earning stories make over $100. The top performers earn more. But they’re the exception, not the rule.

Medium tallies up what your content earns on a regular basis and pays out your balance monthly. Check your Medium dashboard for the latest payout schedules, as the specifics have shifted over time.

As for how to maximize your earnings, well, that’s a topic for another time. You should build your Medium presence steadily, publish consistently, and promote your work for the greatest possible returns.

Using Medium to Advertise Yourself

Using Medium to promote your own company and your own products and services is probably one of the most common ways people use it. No overtly promotional post will hit the big time, and no Medium curator will want to push a sales pitch to the front page. But that doesn’t mean you won’t have much of an audience.

What matters here, in my mind, is to have plenty of high quality content on your own website as well. While it doesn’t seem like maintaining two blogs is a good idea, hear me out.

For your home site, write one flagship post per month. These should be giant, 10K word monstrosities that cover a topic in great detail, full of citations, great information, helpful tips, and data points - it’s not too terribly difficult to produce this level of content on a monthly basis.

Use your Medium blog as your weekly standard blog, like what you’re reading here. Write high quality blog posts, but they don’t need to go into deep dives. The trick, of course, is to link your Medium posts back to your mega-posts on your own site.

Your own site, then, should be sending those who land on it to deeper parts of your sales funnel. Use the tricks in the book: a sidebar scroller, a slide-in, an exit-intent window, a Hello Bar, whatever it takes. Test different tools and combinations of tools to see what you can do to get readers from your posts to your landing pages, or from your posts directly to your product pages.

Obviously, there’s no single answer to this. I leave it to you for the testing and the optimization, just as you would with any marketing strategy.