I’m basing this on limited observation, but it seems that if writers want to make something close to a supplemental wage from Medium, they will have to attract a whole lot of readers, or Medium will have to charge a good bit more for paying membership (and perhaps restrict access).

Say there are 1,000 members who pay $5 per month. (I don’t know the actual figure; the numbers are for illustration only — everything is hypothetical.) Say you write only one story per month, and your story for this month attracts 10% of paying members (I don’t know the formula for calculating engagement, but suppose you somehow achieve maximum engagement, i.e. maximum profit). Then let’s say the cut for writers is 50% (Medium has overhead after all). That means your income (so far) is 100 members x $5 / month x .5 writer’s payment. That’s $250. But this figure assumes the people reading your stories don’t read anyone else’s stories. So if every paying member reads only 10 stories per month (and suppose the engagement for the other stories is identical to yours), then your $250 is divided by 10, which means for one story for one month, you make $25.

Now if you write one story per month, you should see some sort of residual profit from old stories (though some topics have a built-in shelf life and won’t continue to turn a sizable profit after a certain time).

And if you write lots of stories per month (and if many of them are popular and engaging and curated), you could make several times the income you’d get from just one story. But the more stories you write, the smaller your $ / hour becomes. If you write a couple of really engaging stories a day (which could easily take 8 hours), you could end up making less money per month than you would at a fast food place.

So the key (according to my 5th grade math) is to write stories so enticing that they motivate many people to become new members, on topics so that a good many of these stories have some durability. This should benefit residual income as well as income from new work.

A while back, I made a comment about a fairly obscure musician whom I’m researching for a personal publication on Medium. The post obviously wasn’t curated by the Medium staff, but when I continued my research a few weeks later, the post showed up in a Google search (and it wasn’t too far down the list). Clearly Medium had set up a pretty decent automated program for search engine optimization of our content.

This means, I assume, that if we wrote stories so promising that a Google summary would encourage someone who’d never heard of Medium to click on the link and then (eventually) become a paying member, we could do far more to make Medium profitable for ourselves and others than we would simply by encouraging friends and social media acquaintances to take a look at our work.

Now there are many ways to make money from Medium stories besides payments from Medium itself. And (surprise) there are many stories on Medium about how to do so. But a larger, vital community should increase these income streams as well.