Is Vocal Worth It? A Retrospective

If you've been around the site for a while, you've probably seen some retrospectives discussing the experience of using Vocal. Jide Okonjo wrote a piece about what 4 years on Vocal (with 10,000,000 reads!) has been like. Leah Harris wrote another from after writing 50 posts. I really like these, because until Vocal introduces some kind of commenting or messaging feature, these are the only way for Vocal creators to check in with each other while remaining on the site. There are Vocal groups elsewhere on the internet, and you should check those out if you're interested, but if you want to see how Vocal creators feel on Vocal, retrospectives like that are the only way to do it.

This is my attempt at a review/retrospective post, but this is not my 50th post.

The reason why is at the heart of the question, Is Vocal Worth It? So that's what we're doing today. I'm going to give you a peek into my world, and hopefully that will help inform you what Vocal is like for people like me who use it regularly.

I don't know how you got here. Maybe you're another writer with Vocal experience, or maybe you just saw one of Vocal's Facebook ads. Maybe you're investigating Vocal because you saw an ad for The Vocal+ Fiction Awards or maybe there's some other contest in the future with even bigger stakes. Maybe you saw that you can make money on Vocal, so now you're googling "is Vocal a scam?"

Having used the platform for about six months now, I want to share some insights about what Vocal has been like for me, what I think Vocal does well, and where I'd like to see it go in the future.

Two Milestones

According to my Vocal wallet, I hit two milestones in my Vocal experience on December 9th.

1. I published my 50th story.
2. I achieved 1,000 reads.

I'm hugely proud of both of those milestones. It took a lot of work to get here. I had no idea where any of this was going when I got started. I'd seen an ad for a previous Vocal challenge, Doomsday Diary, and I figured it was worth a shot to enter. I didn't win. Lots of stories get submitted, and only a handful walk away with those big prizes, so I was cool with that. To win a Vocal challenge, you need to stand out in a crowded field.

In fact, I haven't won any of the challenges I've entered. But my loss is your gain. After all, only a few Vocal users win the challenges, so their experiences are naturally that of outliers. Nothing in my Vocal experience is that exceptional, which makes it a decent baseline for what Vocal is like.

Also, you should definitely check out Samantha Panepinto's winning story. There's a reason why she was one of the first people I subscribed to on the platform.

So that was my opening experience on Vocal. I wrote a story, didn't win a contest, and I was thinking about moving on from the site. Sometimes you take a shot at something and it goes nowhere. But then I had another idea. See, I really like the idea of Vocal, but I wanted to see how the platform actually operated. That led to...

The Experiment

Can someone be successful on Vocal?

To find out, I decided I would:

• Regularly post a variety of content.
• Participate in as many challenges as possible.
• Track my stats to see what was successful.
• Never promote anything I wrote.
• Do it all under a penname.

Why?

The way I saw it, for the experiment to really be about Vocal, I had to enter here with a clean slate. No background, for better or for worse. Being able to direct people to Vocal from a healthy instagram following or a pre-existing email list isn't that special. If I wrote a guide to being successful on Vocal, but it started with, "Have a million instagram followers," then I'm not actually telling you anything you can implement.

If you go to the Creator 101 section under Resources, I just skipped step 5. I have never promoted anything I've written here, and after 50 posts I achieved about a thousand reads. That is the experiment, and that is the result.

What do you make of that?

Let's Talk CPM

Do you watch YouTube? Do you know how much money famous YouTubers make?

If I tell you that I received a thousand reads, and you see the little Vocal+ badge on my profile picture, you can actually see exactly how much money I made from reads alone on Vocal. If you go to the Vocal+ page, you'll see that the earning's per thousand reads is $6.

(I've actually made more than that on Vocal, but more about that later)

That's not exactly retirement money, but it's actually a lot better than most people realize. The amount of money someone makes from a thousand hits is usually referred to as a CPM or Cost Per Thousand (Mille). Vocal is very up front with this information, and I love that. If you investigate the average CPM on YouTube, you'll spend all day reading various numbers, because different content creators get treated differently on that platform based on what the advertisers like.

Not so with Vocal. You got a thousand reads providing stock-trading advice in Trader? You get paid the exact same amount as someone who get a thousand reads writing erotica in Filthy. I really appreciate how non-judgemental that attitude is, and I hope that Vocal maintains that going forward. YouTubers who make videos about sex education regularly get punished by that system's algorithm, but a Vocal creator who creates similar content will be treated as an equal to any other creator as they should be.

However, on your quest to research CPMs on YouTube, you will probably read that the average is around $2, about one third of what Vocal+ creators get. The difference is that even the biggest Vocal creators are not seeing numbers of hits like the biggest YouTubers. Will that change as Vocal grows? No one can say for certain, but considering YouTube's status as a cultural juggernaut, I have a hard time seeing Vocal hit quite that level. But that doesn't mean that Vocal can't or won't grow.

Also, YouTube shows a view count for every video, but Vocal keeps that for the back-end. If you're new to the site, you can't guess how many hits the average article is getting. So, here's me, being as explicit as possible:

After six months on Vocal and 50 posts with no promotion, collectively my stories hit 1,000 reads. Six dollars. Could I have done better if I'd worked harder to promote my own work? Probably. But the experiment was about using Vocal, so that's what I focused on.

How Did I Get 1000 Reads Without Any Promotion?

Primarily through two avenues.

The first is the most obvious, but it's also the hardest to replicate: Five of my stories have been featured as Top Stories.

This has two huge benefits: first, Vocal places your story on the front page, where your work is more likely to be seen by a wider audience. Each time this has happened it has been extremely exciting. You spend all of your time working on a story, not sure how it will be received, and then suddenly people are reading it.

The second benefit is also fun: Vocal gives you a five dollar tip.

Remember when I said that I've received 6 dollars from reads? Well, I've actually made $131 dollars on Vocal. A chunk of that came from hitting milestones, a chunk of that came from reaching the front page a number of times, and a chunk of that came from participating in every week of the Summer Fiction Series.

This still isn't retirement fund money, but it's also always encouraging. It's fun to feel like you're moving in the right direction, and little bonuses like that from Vocal have made this whole process more enjoyable. I really like that.

So the Top Stories feature is the most obvious way that I got reads on Vocal. The second way is weirder.

See, about half of my reads on the platform come from one story. I don't know why.

This story was never a Top Story, and I honestly have no idea why it has been read over 500 times.

Is it the best thing I've written on the site? I don't think so. I think the best thing I've written on Vocal is a short story called "Lines Written Upon the Discovery of a Corpse."

But this is part of the fun of Vocal if you are of a particular mindset. I watched a couple movies, had a couple thoughts, and then I threw it out to the world, and for some reason that story clicked. The two similar follow-ups I wrote? Meh. The stories that got featured under Top Stories? Didn't get as many reads. But that one? For some reason, that story blew up, and it was so much fun to watch that happen.

I've written before about how the real appeal of Vocal is getting your work in front of other people, and I stand by that. So if you are looking to get rich quick with your writing? Honestly, that sounds like an impossible task. But if you're looking for a platform to share your work, I think there's a lot to recommend about Vocal.

This Is Not My Fiftieth Story

Why isn't this my 50th story? Because I wanted to write another story about Bick & Co, my monster-of-the-week style ghost-hunting crew with a talking cat.

Full disclosure: my Bick & Co. stories have never been my most popular stories. I get far more reads when I write about writing. This story will probably receive more reads than any of the Bick & Co. stories, but I have fun writing them. I like that talking cat, and I like the challenge of trying to write an episodic story. They're hard, but in a fun way.

I don't stay on Vocal because the money is incredible.

I stay on Vocal because I'm still having fun.

Would Vocal Be Fun For You?

That's not a rhetorical question.

Here's what Vocal offers: a sleek platform that allows you to put your work in front of the internet. Sometimes there are challenges, and you can treat those like writing prompts. You can gain subscribers, and you can watch the charts.

As well, it should be noted that Vocal is currently growing. Who knows what it will look like in a year or two?

There are lots of features I'd like to see Vocal add, and I am really interested to see how the platform grows over time. But I'm not here because I'm expecting Vocal to change in ways that I like. I'm here because it's fun. When I watch Don't Look Up later this week, I will have fun reviewing it here. When the time comes, I will have fun writing another Bick & Co. story. I will probably have fun submitting to future challenges, and I will have fun watching the results come in for the Vocal+ Fiction Awards.

If you think that Vocal would be fun for you, I think it's worth a shot. Just make sure to check in with yourself and make sure that you're actually enjoying the process and benefiting from it.

As for me, I'm not married to the platform, but as long as I'm having fun? I'll be kicking around.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider checking out some of my other writing. If you like what you see, I'd appreciate it if you left a like and subscribed.

If you have any questions about Vocal that weren't addressed in the post, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]