How does Medium pay millions of writers monthly for only the $5 paid by members?
On March 3, 2016 Ev Williams announced what would be the hybrid platform where all Mediums writers could make money writing their stories.
The way to raise money would be to include a paywall system, ie when a text can only be viewed if the person is a subscriber of the page. The idea of the company was to start accepting advertising content that could be a good option at the first moment, something that would certainly help generate more profit for the platform.
A few months later Medium became the platform where members would contribute $5 a month or $50 a month to anyone who would like to read more member stories, and then pay this to members enrolled in the Medium Partner Program. Now the unspoken question is:
How does Medium pay millions of writers monthly, just depending on the $5 monthly and $50 annual paid by Medium members paid?
Well, looking at the amount paid monthly by members of the Medium Partner Program, based on the monthly membership contribution of just $5, for some it may seem almost impossible to pay millions of members monthly. But I want to show you that this is indeed possible and there is still plenty of balance to the platform’s profit.
Let’s take a look at the September 2019 earnings, which so far is one of the highest earnings ever paid on the platform by a single writer, where according to member engagement:
58% of writers or publications, at least one story for each member made money.
8.9% of active writers earned at least $100
$30,638.81 was the highest amount earned by a single writer and $5,957.56 was the highest amount earned by a single story.
As you can see, 8.9% of active members earn up to $100 we can assume that this 8.9% is around 200,000 members out there. Another 200 thousand members is not much? No, not much you will already understand where I want to go.
So as I was saying, let’s imagine the 8.9% is at least 200,000 members, so we would make $100x200,000 equal to $20 million, so $20 million plus $30,638.81 plus $5,957.56 will equal $20,036,596.40.
What? Would Medium pay all this in September for just $ 5 in contributions from members? Seriously, go.
Take it easy that you will now understand that it is possible and still left over to the platform’s profit to pay its employees normally.
First let’s start with Ev Williams, the CEO of the Medium platform. He has on his Medium personal page more than 210,000 followers. Medium’s official page has over 1,500,000 followers, and the Medium Staff page has over 36 million followers. Remembering that all of these followers are Medium members, no one can follow anyone on the platform without being a member subscribed to the Medium platform.
Now that we’ve seen how many followers have the top three pages, let’s just take Medium Staff followers, let’s forget the CEO followers or Medium’s official page followers.
If at least among Medium’s more than 36 million followers, we get only 25 and a half million followers, and those 25 and a half million, they all regularly pay $5 a month as members; then multiplying 25.5 million times 5 dollars a month, the Medium platform would yield nothing more than $127.5 million per month, so the $20,036,596.40 paid in September 2019 would be like paying for a luxury flight ticket.
So you could understand how powerful the Medium platform is and how this paid membership would increasingly fortify the platform and could we win without any time? There is no way for a platform to go bankrupt with these gains without relying on sponsorship, advertising or any other business.
And with this platform, we can leverage our stories to the highest level and make Medium a job, because for members who earn $1,000 up to $30,000 monthly on Medium, they no longer need a job.
This is the Medium you didn’t know.
