4 Reasons Why Vocal Is Better Than Medium for Writers

I started writing on Medium in August 2020. Initially, I did not know that you could earn money from that. However, as soon as I did, I joined the Meidum partner program and started earning cents for my articles.

Since then, I have earned around 550–600$ just from writing on the website. The major chunk of the money has come from a commissioned piece I did for a publication.

Coming to Vocal, I discovered this website 2 months ago. Since then I have been cross-posting my articles from Medium on Vocal.

While I have earned less than a dollar from the reads, however, I have able to get 12$ from the tip. My article talking about Coffee Naps was chosen as a staff picked and shared on the socials and the front page as well.

All in all, it has been a good experience on Vocal.

While both websites have pros and cons, there are several areas where Vocal is better than Medium. Even though I have earned more money from Medium, however, I see that Vocal has great potential and I will definitely keep on posting here as well.

The 4 areas where I feel that Vocal takes the crown from Medium are as following.

1. Tip

On Vocal, if a reader likes your story they can leave a tip. The amount of tip ranges from a dollar to 20$. Personally, I have been able to gain 12$ just from tipping. 

Not only does tipping provide you with the monetary benefit, but also boosts your self about being good enough for someone to leave a tip. 

A pro tip - If your story gets staff picked, they send you 10$ as a reward. 

2. Moderation 

On Vocal, you can not just post anything, unlike Medium. You need to submit your draft for review to Moderators.

Usually, they take a maximum of 24 hours to approve your story. In my 2 months on Vocal, all my stories got published within hours of clicking on the submit for review button. 

The moderators also put your story in a category depending on the nature of the article to drive views. 

I think this is wonderful as this has allowed Vocal to moderate out hateful content. 

3. All views are valid

Unlike Medium, where you can get 100k views from Google but you would not earn a single penny, on Vocal it doesn't matter.

You can get views from any country and source and you would still earn the same amount. 

On Vocal, if you have the membership, you earn 6$ for 1000 views and about 4$ per 1000 views for non-members. 

Therefore, if you know SEO and are able to rank your articles high on the search engine, you can easily earn in triple digits from a single article.

On the other hand, on Medium you need views from the paying members in order to earn some cash. 

4. Challenges

Now, challenges are the best part of the website. 

Vocal holds weekly challenges. Every challenge has three prizes with the first one being 1000$ and the last being 250$. Not only this, I have seen contests where the first prize goes up to 5000$. 

Imagine being able to earn in 4 digits just from one story.

Even though I have never actually won anything from these challenges, however, if you can think out of the box and have creative ideas you can snatch a prize for sure. 

On Medium, I have seen people earn 1–2k$ on viral stories. The thing with viral stories is that they are very hard to get.

While weekly challenges are very frequent, viral stories come once in a blue moon for average Medium writers. 

Final Thoughts

I love Medium and Vocal, equally. 

While there are some positive points to Vocal, Medium wins in other areas such as interface and writing tools.  

The best idea is to actually try your hands on both the websites and make the best of both worlds.

This can help you earn some cash and get viewers as well.