How Much Money Does Medium Pay Per 1,000 Views?
Written by Casey Botticello
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When I first started writing on Medium, there were no affordable resources available for writers. Growing my monthly Medium earnings to over $1,000 per month was hard and took me over a year! That's why I created my own Medium Course.
CASEY BOTTICELLO
Founder, Blogging Guide
One of the first questions that new Medium writers often ask is how much money can they make writing on Medium. And while I’ve answered this question in detail, the next follow up question, once they start to publish content is how much money does Medium pay per 1,000 views?
The answer to this question will vary based on the type of content you write and the audience that is reading your work. Medium does not pay writers per view. Writers are paid through the Medium Partner Program which pays based on how long Medium members spend reading your content. But, having run multiple Medium accounts for several years, it is fair to say that the average Medium article generates anywhere from $4.32 to $8.19 per 1,000 views (Medium RPM).
This article will explore earnings data that I’ve collected on Medium Partner Program earnings per 1,000 views, from various Medium accounts over time.
How Does the Medium Partner Program Pay Writers?
As noted above, Medium does not actually pay writers directly based on the number of views an article receives.
So in order to put the earnings per 1,000 views into proper context, let’s first discuss how the Medium Partner Program actually pays writers.
As explained by Medium:
Partner Program writers are paid every month based on how members engage with their stories. This is determined by member reading time. Each member’s subscription fee is distributed proportionally to the stories that the individual member engaged with that month…Writers can also earn from referred memberships. For every new reader that you convert to a paying Medium member, you’ll receive half of that new reader’s membership fee, net of standard payment processor fees. Referral earnings are recurring as long as the reader’s membership plan remains active.
So, based on the actual payment system of the Medium Partner Program, there is going to be a vary wide range of RPMs (Revenue per Mille).
Here are a few common circumstances that might skew a Medium writers’ earnings per thousand views:
Large amounts of external traffic. Medium writers are not paid for views that originate from external traffic sources (unless the reader happens to be a paid Medium member). What often will happen is that an article will rank well in Google, generate huge amounts of traffic, and yet, the article earnings will remain quite low because 99%+ of the traffic is external. This also happens with many articles that go viral after being shared on social media.
High number of referred memberships. Medium referred memberships are a form of recurring revenue. If someone becomes a paid Medium member, using your affiliate link, you received 50% of their monthly payment for as long as they remain a paid Medium member. So writers with a high amount of referred memberships will have their earnings per thousand artificially inflated (they continue to earn even if there articles get little or no new views each month).
Having a Medium audience comprised of the same limited group of paid Medium members. Under the Medium Partner Program, all views are not valued equally. Because of the system of proportional allocation based on member read time, views that originate from infrequent Medium members will always be more valuable than Medium members who consume a wide range of content (unless they also happen to consumer a disproportionate amount of your content, when compared to their overall reading patterns). So generally speaking, if you have a small and devoted following of Medium members who read some or all of your articles, and those members also read a lot of other Medium articles, you will most likely earn less money than someone who consistently attracts new Medium members (especially if they overall read less content on Medium, in turn spending a large amount of their time reading your articles).
How Much is 1,000 Views Worth on Medium?
As noted in the introduction, through years of publishing content across multiple Medium accounts, I have arrived at some dollar amounts for a rough estimate on how much money writers on Medium earn per 1,000 views.
To calculate the Medium earnings per 1,000 views, also known as the Medium RPM, I divided the total Medium Partner Program earnings from a given month by the total views my articles received that month. I then multiplied this result by 1000, as explained in the diagram below:
So, as an example, as originally documented in my March 2020 Medium Income Report, I earned $868.45 for that month on my main Medium account (@caseybotticello):
For this same month, my articles received 47,339 views:
Using the formula above, my Medium RPM (Revenue per Thousand Views) for March was $18.34.
This is definitely on the higher side, because as I mentioned in the section above about factors that may skew this metric, I have a substantial amount of my earnings derived (in recent months) from the Medium Referred Memberships.
As most new writers will likely have little or no earnings from this source, it’s probably best to run the calculation excluding this second source of earnings. This means that my adjusted earnings for March were $669.56.
Running the calculation again gives me a Medium RPM of $14.14 in March.
But of course, this is just the data from a single month, and is too small of a sample size to extrapolate these earnings to anyone else. So I calculated the RPM for each month since I first started writing on Medium, for my main Medium account:
This data underscored a few key points about RPM (earnings per thousand views) on Medium
Medium RPMs increase over time. Perhaps the clearest pattern to emerge from this data was the trend indicating that Medium RPMs increase over time. This clear trend was surprising to me given the wide range of views and earnings seen each month (some months had less than 1,000 views and some had more than 100,000 views, whereas adjusted Medium Partner Program earnings fluctuated from ~$20 to $1,000+ per month). Interestingly, I ran this same data analysis on several of my other Medium accounts, and the upward growth was seen in each account (even though there was a huge variation in total earnings and views).
Average RPM (Mean) = $7.64 The average of this data (by month) was $7.64 and the median was $9.03. Based on data from my other Medium accounts, the average RPM of $7.64 seemed accurate, but perhaps on the higher side.
Range of RPMS Across All Medium accounts = $4.32 – $8.19. Looking across all my alternate Medium accounts, they ranged from $4.32 to $8.19 per thousand views on Medium. This was a fairly tight band, especially since some of the accounts had been used simply to test content and my focus was not on maximizing earnings. uses to determine which stories to feature.
Conclusion
Medium is popular for it’s Partner Program, and with good reason! Based on my data, writers can expect to earn between $4.32 and $8.19 per 1,000 views on their Medium articles, per month. While this may not jump out to the casual reader as a huge amount, when you factor in Medium’s extremely high Domain Authority (allowing you to rank far more quickly than on virtually any other site), it can add up pretty quickly!
If you want to learn more about Medium, check out my free Medium guide. You can also check out my Medium writing course, if you really want to accelerate your growth as a writer on the platform!
