I’m wondering if it’s financially worth it to cover the $5/mo membership.

I post Medium articles fairly regularly, and each email update shows I get ~500 reads total.

Is that enough to cover the $5/mo? Would it be a wise financial risk?

Are people willing to share their readership and total MMR?

Edit: shouldn’t have shared my financial situation; was interested in data/advice only.

  • WxFischEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

    If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

    • @agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5•9 months ago

      Unless you’re writing some insanely great shit about a ridiculously popular topic or you majorly luck out somehow, it stands no chance of getting huge. It’s like sports stars. For every one of those there’s tens or hundreds of thousands that nobody will ever hear about.

      Or maybe I just suck and I’m bitter lol. My website was doing like 11k visits a month, max, at one point. I think I got like 2 checks from Google in five years. Enough for two fancy date nite dinners.

      • @Synnr@sopuli.xyz
        1•9 months ago

        Nope, that’s about standard or even better than most, unless you’re doing it full-time.

    • @Synnr@sopuli.xyz
      1•9 months ago

      Unless you’re making more than $16 each month (most are not making anywhere close to that) from Medium then you’re just choosing another company to profit off of you. It’s also more work and takes a lot (arguably, depending on your technical comfort level) more time because again… most people have nothing of much value to say. If you’re an expert on your field or a great marketer, sure maybe you can make that $16 back and then some. Most can not. You’ll know if you can, and you can look at your medium analytics and judge that and then do the Wix thing because…

      Do you own the content that you publish on Medium?

      Yes. Everything you publish on Medium, that is rightfully yours, belongs to you and you can republish, delete or choose to convert it into other forms without worrying about anything because Medium gives you the ownership. They have clearly explained this in the Medium terms of service.

      Medium (company) might use your content to redistribute, translate or modify, and they need your permission for this. They need licensing for this because of the Medium rule; “You own your content”

      Medium is like an ocean in part because it’s so easy and free. There are some really spectacular fish and animals and rare finds and even shipwrecks full of gold and treasure. There is also a metric shit-ton of mediocrity.

      A comparison could be made to YouTube or tiktok. Sure, you can make videos and upload them to your website and then share them. But there is immense value in the existing community in algorithm.