Medium Is Paying My Rent This Month and Here’s What I Did.

A tale of my first experience with the Medium Partner Program

Filipe Silva
7 min readMay 20, 2020

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Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

Money was never the purpose. I was in the mood for an experiment, though. I like making bets on something where I can never lose. Those are the best kind of bets. Writing an article and putting it on Medium Partner Program is one of those bets.

What’s, literally, the worst that can happen?

I’ll tell you. These 4 things happen:

  • You get a little better at writing;
  • You get a better idea of what people like to read;
  • You earn $0;
  • You spend 1 to 4 hours of your time;

Can you live with these consequences?

Here’s how three articles just made my month

The results of my first article in the Medium Partner Program.
The results of my first article in the Medium Partner Program.

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Well, $3.81 is not $0, but what most surprised me was those 2 hours and 41 minutes of member reading time. That’s half the time of what it took me to write the article in the first place. It felt like I already had half payment for my work.

You can see in the graph how it fizzled out until it picked up again 2 weeks later. That’s because of my second article.

65 dollars in a single day is not nothing.
65 dollars in a single day is not nothing.

This blew me away. I was expecting similar success. In fact, I was having similar success on the first day, with a very similar 2 hours and 52 minutes of member reading time, but then things escalated (and eventually crashed) quickly. After almost a month, this article averages $10 in earnings per day.

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Filipe Silva

filipesilva.me — From software engineering to football coaching. This Week’s Worth💎is my weekly newsletter. Find it here: thisweeksworth.substack.com