Member-only story
Help! My stories aren’t being read to the end!
I’ve discovered part of why I’m not making money on Medium.
This morning, I looked at my dismal partner program earrings for this month. Sitting at $3.15, mid-month, I doubt that I’ll reach my modest goal of making $12.00 from the Medium Partner Program for November.
I’ve been in Medium Partner Program since late July 2022. I’ve written daily. I’ve engaged with other writers, by reading and commenting on their posts. I’ve returned messages to those that have been nice enough to leave a comment on my articles. I’m tagging my articles appropriately and I’m using a headline analyzer to get the most bang for my buck — so to speak.
There are two problems that I’ve discovered. One, when one of my articles does well, it is primarily because of external views. This has happened to me time and time again. My most widely read articles are 98% external views. No pay for those.
And today, after doing some investigation on my stats page, I discovered another problem leading to low payouts. And, that is readers, on Medium, are not sticking with my articles. They bail before they get more than two-thirds of the way through. This is true if I am interpreting the reading time correctly. Most of my articles are 4–5 minutes long. My reading time for recent articles is…
