Last month was my best month ever on Medium. This month things have gone back down a bit, but I’m still pretty happy with my results.
Let me show you everything that happened.
First, here’s a short recap of August…
Quickie August stats
- Writing through Medium: 7,592 followers and $2,183.94
- Affiliate sales: $26.58
- Buy Me a Coffee: $3.00
- Gumroad: $137.03
I made a total of: $2,350.55
September 2025 Results
Here’s what happened on Medium this month…
Reads & Views
Here are the reads & views I had in August for comparison:
I had the highest amounts of reads, views, follower, subscribers, and earnings ever in August. Here’s what September looked like:
Presentations is a new stat, and it’s just how many times your articles have been put in front of someone, either on Medium’s “For You” page, via an email, or whatever other methods they have to show your articles to readers.
They also added followers and subscribers to the stats page, which is awesome for easy viewing.
But I’ll still show you the more detailed view of followers next…
Followers
This is the first time I’m seeing this new Followers page with the chart.
That’s a nice and steady incline for the year.
Earnings:
September marks my second highest earnings in a month, even though they went down over $500 from last month.
I’m not too concerned about the earnings going down. As you can see, they fluctuate all the time. It’s the nature of the beast.
Now let me show you which articles earned the most in September…
Four of these articles were written in September. That’s great because they should continue to earn throughout the coming months, just like the rest of these have been.
A couple of these are interesting…
11 Things People Secretly Hate (But Pretend to Enjoy) beat out my “Wastes of Money” ChatGPT article, which has been earning like crazy the past few months. In his Inner Circle community, Mark Thompson called this one genius as soon as I wrote it.
For some reason, he saw something in this one that I didn’t see yet. I write a lot of these types of articles, and they don’t all do this well, so Mark has a special talent. He’s a genius himself!
Let’s look at more details about how it’s done so far:
Medium’s added more new stats, which is fantastic! I have a better idea of how many people are seeing these articles and how many people are clicking on them.
I don’t know what a good “Feed clickthrough” rate is, but Mark said he thinks over 10% is likely good. A 78% read ratio is fantastic. I’m very happy with that.
$422 in earnings is also excellent, especially for only two weeks. I’m curious to see how far this one goes…
Early stats would indicate that 7 “Normal” Money Habits (That Secretly Ruin People Financially) is also going to do very well. I only wrote this one 6 days ago (at the time I’m writing this), and it already has 100 clappers, which indicates that people are responding well to it. Let’s look at the stats…
The feed clickthrough on this one isn’t quite as high as the “11 Things” article, but the read ratio is very similar. We’ll have to check back in on this one next month.
There’s one more interesting article in the top earners…
You can see the feed clickthrough and read ratios aren’t that great. But what’s interesting about this one is that I wrote it back in June. It did absolutely nothing (and I didn’t expect it too because it’s a weird topic) until Septmeber:
It must have been placed in front of the right people at the right time and got picked up.
That’s the thing about Medium…just put stuff out there because you just never know. Some things take off right away, and others take off much later. It’s a surprise every time!
Here’s one more article that I *think* is going to do well. I just wrote it yesterday (at the time of this writing), so this is only a day’s worth of stats. But it’s looking good already:
A 17.4% feed clickthrough and a 72% read ratio are fantastic indicators that good things will be happening with this one.
We’ll check back next month to see for sure.
Total Medium earnings: $1,649.82
Everything Else
My other streams of income include:
- Gumroad
- Buy Me a Coffee
- Affiliate & Benable sales
I’ll just give you a quick update on these since they don’t do as well for me.
Affiliate sales: $44.00 This includes a couple of recurring affiliate sales, plus $17.54 from Amazon.
Benable: I earned a whopping $0.71 in cashback from Benable in September. It’s going to take me an eternity to earn enough to cash out that cashback. I’m not really worried about it at this point.
Buy Me a Coffee: $0. I don’t promote it or do anything special with BMAC so this isn’t a surprise.
Amazon KDP: $4.30. I took my book off the site a while ago, but earnings are still trickling in.
Gumroad = $299.54 (for activity August 21 – September 19 , which includes any affiliate sales and takes out affiliate fees and platform fees.)
- 6 Steps To Write and Market an Ebook (and Make Money Too) → 2 sales ($44)
- The Gumroad Guide: The Step-By-Step Guide to Mastering Your Gumroad Sales → 0 sales ($0) *Note: This is also a free bonus for 6 Steps to Write and Market an Ebook.
- Medium Mistakes → 0 sales ($0) *Note: This is also a free bonus for Medium Money.
- Medium Money: The Simple Guide to Writing Articles That Pay → 13 sales ($326.70)
- The 4-Step Affiliate Marketing System → 4 downloads ($1, someone paid even though they didn’t have to since this is a free product.)
Sales of my Medium Money book are taking off again. Gumroad does a great job of bringing me new sales directly, but I also recently restarted my Intellectualists newsletter, and I have a 50% off promo for people who sign up there.
It does well:
Total Earnings
2025:
- January 2025 = $1,449.67
- February 2025 = $680.08
- March 2025 = $795.27
- April 2025 = $1,503.01
- May 2025 = $1,807.19
- June 2025 = $1,827.03
- July 2025 = $1,168.61
- August 2025 = $2350.55
- September 2025 = $1,997.66
2024:
- January 2024 = $1,008.10
- February 2024 = $1.045.69
- March 2024 = $664.55
- April 2024 = $1,111.32
- May 2024 = $713.60
- June 2024 = $1,095.47
- July 2024 = $953.89
- August 2024 = $938.42
- September 2024 = $492.98
- October 2024 = $508.28
- November 2024 = $491.12
- December 2024 = $215.38
Future Plans
As mentioned, I recently restarted my Intellectualists newsletter, and I already changed it. I started with 5 links to curated resources, plus a quick challenge. But, I wasn’t feeling it. Here’s what it looked like when I relaunched it, and what it looks like now, just a couple weeks later.
Will I finally settle on this new format?
I don’t know because I change my mind a lot. 😅
I’ll keep with it until it doesn’t work for me anymore.
The other experiment I’m trying with it is to send it out intermittently instead of following a strict schedule. This might be a terrible idea because people like routine.
But…
I wanted to try it because of slot machines. Yup! Slot machines are so addicting because they give you intermittent rewards. It makes it exciting because you never know what you’re going to get and when. (Medium is like this too…) So I thought I would try out intermittent sends and see if anyone latches onto it.
It might not work because there’s no jackpots coming out of my newsletters (unless I can think of a way to do that…lol), but you never know!
I also want to come up with a good lead magnet/email sequence to grab new subscribers. To be determined…
Finally…
In September, I wrote 11 articles on Medium. My October goal is to double that to 22. There’s a decent chance our favorite music festival in Las Vegas is coming back in 2026, and I’m highly motivated to earn money for that trip. THIS is what I write for… Hell. Yes! 🤘🏻