In May 2016, I wanted to start a site like Grantland or The Onion. Professional, long-form pieces meant for public consumption. Something different from the personal, short blog posts on Hoagie Central that often only make sense if you know me personally.
At that point, I had written Autopilot in 2008-09 and Pie for Breakfast in 2013. Something in me was pushing me to write more, but another book didn't seem like the right thing. It takes a long time and the payoff isn't there, both financially and somewhat emotionally—at least, that payoff is quite delayed.
Compared to writing another book, the idea of putting up shorter pieces, humor pieces, each on a different topic appealed to me. So I emailed my friends and asked for advice on naming the new site.
Niraj suggested Medium as the home for my new site. I took a look and was hooked. By the next day I started publishing pieces.
I put up a bunch of stuff in 2016 on Medium. I wrote pieces in styles I had never explored before. It was very fulfilling. And due to Medium having a built-in audience, people were reading my articles. That was fun and exciting, and also foreign territory.
One thing that was very eye-opening and unexpected, was that I could get a real sense of what kinds of things people were interested in reading. And throughout the fall of 2016, the articles that did the best were the political humor pieces. The Trump election season was top of mind, and those pieces rose to the top.
Based on these results, I developed an idea for my next book in January 2017, just as Trump was taking office. A choose your own adventure book. I stepped away from Medium and spent my writing time in 2017 creating Choose Your Own Trump.
Once I walked away from Medium, it was hard to get back to it. Part of it I think is that after writing a book, I need a break from writing. I kept up with Hoagie Central. The Chiefs drafted Mahomes so that demanded my full attention. I also got fired and had to get a new job. And then once I got a new job, that required my undivided attention.
Every week, Medium kept emailing me stats for the week. And they were always the same:
January, February, March, this story kept getting views and earned exactly zero cents. I (wrongly) concluded that the only way to earn even a penny was massive amounts of views. As it turns out, Medium pays writers for Member reading time and Member claps. (To read beyond the paywall of 5 stories a month, you have to be a paying Medium member, which costs $50 a year.) But I didn't know that yet. So I gave up any idea that Medium could make any money, even a few dollars.
Then Covid-19 came. Our school went virtual for the year. The NBA, NHL and March Madness all got cancelled. People are dying and scared and our President is calling it a hoax. I was reading all these bits and fragments of news and needed a way to process it all. I started writing it down.
I could have put it on Hoagie Central, but I've tried to keep most of the political thoughts off this space. The exceptions are I'll usually note my views on the Presidential election campaign at least once, mostly as a way to record my views, not persuade others.
So I put up this piece on Medium instead: How We Got Here: Trump, COVID-19 & You
If that's all I had done, nothing would have changed. But I did one more thing. I emailed Niraj.
He proofread my article and found a typo. This is the moment that changed things. I just didn't know it yet.
At the end of April, I had earned my first money from Medium. For criticizing the 45th President, I earned:
This was the eye-opener. I could actually earn money. The article had only gotten 7 views. I didn't understand yet the bit about the Members. I just concluded that old articles weren't making money—that I had to write new ones.
Somehow I found an email course from Tom Kuegler that gave me tips for how to succeed on Medium. And in 2016, I wasn't doing ANY of them. One of them, was that you earn money from Members' reading time and claps. So armed with the knowledge that it's possible to earn money and actual tips, I launched a new Medium publication on May 20, 2020. Once again. I went to Niraj for approval on the new name, 40 Fathoms.
By May 22, I was seeing results from using the tips. And then Niraj reveals something that makes everything click:
Niraj is a green circle. He's a paying Medium Member. So when he proofread my Covid piece back in April, that 45 cents was from him. His reading time and applause gave me my first Medium earnings. Which gave me the confidence to invest energy in trying to earn money. If he wasn't a paying member, I wouldn't have earned any money from his reading time and I never would have known you could make money on this site.
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I started right at the end of May, so June was my first full month applying what I know and trying to monetize my writing. I earned $20.93 in June.
In early June, I made a goal. I wrote it down. My goal was to earn $500 in one month in the year 2020. It was ambitious. I didn't quite realize how ambitious yet.
My thinking was that:
a) Earning $5000 a year would be cool, so if I could get to the point where I was earning about $500 a month that would be great.
b) This would be a gradual steady climb as I earn more and more followers. $20 in June could turn into $60 in July, $120 in August, etc. to the point where I was earning $500 in December.
That was the plan.
And then in July I earned $24.67. I had even published something in the most popular humor site, Slackjaw. It became my most profitable post to date. It earned 6 bucks its first week.
I saw that in July, 5.8% of Medium writers earned over $100 a month. And I'm on pace for a $30 August.
So I deleted my $500 in one month goal. I was running out of backlogged content. Medium was about to become a place where I sporadically posted, not lining up a new post every day. I got back into Hoagie Central and was watching sports again.
- - -
And then on August 12, FiveThirtyEight published their 2020 Presidential Election Forecast. I've been a big fan of 538 for a while. In particular, I think their average of the Trump approval rating paints a much better picture than bouncing from the latest polls, which can skew both directions.
So I went to their forecast, expecting to see a big map of each state, colored a shade of red or blue, and didn't see one. Instead they had bubbles and snakes and lots of tiny, tiny maps but no one big map. So mainly for my own curiosity, I started processing their forecast. I saw that Biden had a lead but Trump needed a few more states to go his way. So I wrote this piece:
I published it.
August 12 it got 32 views.
August 13 it got 31 views.
This was on pace to be a very normal story. After two days, it had earned less than $1.50.
Then I got an email:
Neat, I thought. This was the 5th time this has happened and all five became popular by my standards, earning anywhere from 2 to 6 bucks.
August 14 it got 383 views. It earned $9.55 becoming my most profitable story. Cool.
August 15 it got 1.8K views and earned over $50 that day.
My previous high for any one story was 33 fans (people that clapped for the story.) On the 15th this story reached 100 fans. I said this is the moneymaker I've dreamed off. When I saw the cumulative total at midnight after the 15th, and saw it had earned $61.09, I was floored. I was happy with $10 bucks.
I woke up on August 16 and it had gone viral. Usually my Medium account has 2 or 3 notifications overnights of new followers or claps. I had 180 notifications while I was sleeping. And they just keep coming in.
August 16 was the peak. It got 19.2K views. It earned $320 that day.
Though the numbers went down from there, it's had a surprisingly decent run in the two weeks since. Each day, that single story has earned at least 25 dollars, far more than any other story. More than all my stories combined in my best month previously.
Then on August 17, something that I hadn't even dreamed of happening, happened.
Here are the numbers at the end of August.
As of August 12, my most fans on a single piece was 33. This one got 872. My popular post also drove more traffic to all my stories, directly creating my 2nd and 3rd most profitable pieces as well.
Without it, I was on pace for a $30 August. With it I reached $1243. So even though it says $1132, I consider it a $1213, with 80 bucks coming in driving traffic to others.
All of a sudden, because of one single thing that I wrote almost on a whim, I became in the top 5% for sure, possibly top 1% of Medium writers in August. I achieved my $500 a month goal that I had just deleted for being too ambitious. I even hit #1, which was never even a goal.
I had read somewhere that you shouldn't spend all your time writing $10 posts, you should be focused on how to write a $1000 post. The advice cracked me up, because at that point most of my stories earned a dollar, if that. So a $10 post seemed beyond possible.
And the whole time this was happening, ever since May 22, 2020, I knew that without Niraj being a member and being my go-to guy for editing, none of this would have happened.
It was only in writing this post, that I realized Niraj was the one who referred me to Medium in the first place, way back in 2016.
And it was just now that I realized, his first email where I found out about Medium, was also on May 22 in 2016.
Downright spooky.
- - -
Beyond the money, I'm very thankful for my entire journey on Medium. It was the 2016 run that led me to write Choose Your Own Trump. And this 2020 run has led me to write an entire library of new posts. New humor pieces, new interactive detective stories, new political stories. I have a site that looks like a Grantland or The Ringer or The Onion, full of stories that I'm proud of.
Getting claps, earning money, and reaching #1 on Medium makes my ego happy.
For the two to be aligned, makes each one even better.
(For most of my life, these goals have always been separate. The things I've created have not found traditional success, and the traditional success I've found be it through work awards, paychecks or even winning fantasy/Calcutta sports, have not been connected to the art I've created.)
That's why this means so much to me. It's not about the actual money being a life-changing amount of money. But earning $5 from a story that gets a couple hundred views and 20 claps feels better than getting a much larger amount of money as a Christmas gift. So when I look back at these results, it's hard to wrap my head around how exciting it is.
- - -
The first takeaway is that Niraj is awesome and I owe him beers for quite a while. I could buy him a beer a week for a year and I would still be indebted to him for all the conversations and help he has provided along this journey.
The second is that I am incredibly lucky. As it turned out, this 5 States post was over a $1000 post. But it so easily could have been a $2 post. If Medium curators passed on it, it would have been. They've curated other stories that maxed out at 3 bucks.
So somehow it was the right combination of headline, picture, ending and an incredibly fortuitous decision by Medium to curate it. I'm still not sure how exactly people saw it so much.
I think about this a lot. In sports, championship-winning athletes put in a MASSIVE amount of hard work. It's easy to point to them holding a trophy and saying, look at how all their hard work paid off. But what that ignores is that there are thousands of other athletes who are also putting in massive amounts of hard work and coming up short.
The same applies across every category of entertainment and any other field you can think of. Hard work is a requirement for success. But so is luck.
I could have published the same exact story, but if the curator who stumbled upon my piece had been in a worse mood, or had to go to the bathroom, or leave work early, they might have passed on mine. And I'd be sitting here with a $30 August.
- - -
The funny thing is that this one piece is not my favorite piece. It's not even in the top ten. If I could have gotten the same results for something else, I would picked a humor piece or maybe the second detective case. But you don't get to pick. And I'm definitely not complaining.
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