Overcoming Medium’s 30 Seconds Rule for a Higher Earnings

I joined Medium this August, 2024. My main desire is to get my voice heard on what I believed in, influence my followers and impact the world.

But second most important on my list is to make some money as a writer. The image above is my dream earnings as I labour everyday not really knowing when this dream may come through.

Till date, I’ve had almost 600 followers and earned less than $30 in the partnership program.

I have realised all the claps, the highlights and the comments.

But the essential questions I always ask myself is, how does medium compute these points and how do they inure to my benefits in terms of monetary gains.

I decided to dive deep into researching on how Medium works and these are my findings;

1. A Quick Peep On How Medium Now Calculates Your Earnings

i. How Long Members Spend Reading or Listening to Your Story

“As Medium members spend more time reading or listening to your story, you will earn more. Member reads and Member read ratios are defined as paying members who read your story for 30 seconds or more divided by total views. Reading and listening times are combined to generate the "member reading time" metric.”

The above is a quote directly from Medium’s help library and it indicates how you are paid based on the reading and listening of members to your story or article. Remember this applies to members under the partnership program.

Members under the partnership program are supposed to read or listen to your article for a minimum of 30 seconds for Medium to consider your story as read.

A view constitute a member who loads your page but back off or scroll off before 30 seconds. Remember this has to be a paid member and not an outsider.

ii. How Reading Time is Calculated

“We calculate reading time based on the amount of time that a viewer spends actively reading on the page.

We consider the viewer’s scrolling and activity, and then determine how long the viewer spent reading the story.

We take care to differentiate between gaps in scroll activity versus long periods of time during which the viewer stepped away for a coffee break.

Your earnings are calculated based on a mix of factors, not a calculation based on word or time count. “

As of August 1, 2023, we define the read ratio as people who read your story for 30 seconds or more divided by total views.”

The above are findings from Medium’s help assisted pages on how reading time is calculated.

From the above, it means that your earnings are calculated based on the 30 seconds rule for the number of people who read your story for 30 seconds divided by the number of views.

Let’s Examine this Carefully;

What does it take to keep partner readers on your page for 30 seconds?

The 30 second read is what we must all focus on if you really want to make some meaningful gains in your writing.

This is how it plays out; 30 seconds read/number of views = amount paid

This shows that, as your 30 seconds reads go up, your number of views must come down. This is the only way your amount paid will go up.

When the views for a particular story goes up, this will tremendously reduce the value of the reads and your amount paid will go down.

iii. How Listening Time is Calculated

“We calculate earnings from listen time the same way that we calculate earnings from read time.

Earnings from listen time are automatically incorporated into your earnings and will be represented as part of “Member reading time” on your stats detail page.

However, since we can’t account for pauses in scrolling – which allows us to measure periods when a listener may have stepped away – a maximum of two full listens per member is applied toward earnings from listen time.”

The above is coming straight from Medium’s help pages.

Let’s Examine this Carefully;

Now, Medium applies 2 full listening from members to account for your listening time earnings.

What this means is that, if the member finished listening to your story but did it in short bouts and the system could not recognised two full listening, though the story was finished, you may not earn towards it.

The reason being that, any short break assumes to the algorithm that your listener has stopped and stepped away, this therefore could not be counted as a true listening. (too bad).

How to Get Over This

To get over this, you have to ensure your story or article is well loaded with audience retentive content straight at the beginning. This could give you your first full listening though Medium did not state how long that listening time should be.

The introduction should be long enough and should leave a cliff hanger which will give the listener that urge to read the full pack to the end where the story wraps up and the concluding part is revealed.

All this bores down to the fact that, your story should be interesting and captivating enough for your audience to spend enough time listening in order for you to make that two full listening blocks.

2. How Stories Earn Engagement Points

“Instead of simply using the member read time as the single input to earnings, we’re moving to a system where reads and engagements earn different amounts of points based on member activity on your stories.”

Below are the scenarios that Medium considers in allotting points for your reads and the various engagements like claps, comments and highlights.

Scenario 1: Logged out user

“Someone clicks on a link to your story from search, or from a share on social media.

They aren’t logged in to Medium. This will be counted as a non-member view on your story stats page.

If they read for over 30 seconds they’ll be counted as a non-member read as well. Since they’re logged out, no other engagements are possible. No earnings will accrue.”

This first scenario is just by getting people on social or search to read your stories and has nothing to do with earning any credit to your account.

Scenario 2: Logged in, non-member user

“Same as above, except this time when they visit your story page they’re logged in as a non-member account.

This will also be counted as a view in your story stats. If they stay for 30 seconds it will count as a non-member read as well. If they clap, highlight, or respond to the story, these actions will show up in your story stats but will not count towards earnings.”

If our case is towards earning, then non-members logging in to read have nothing to do with that. This begs the question of sharing your links on social media for outsiders to read your stories for earnings.

If they log in and read and it doesn’t accrue to any earnings, then it’s purely towards influence and awareness.

Scenario 3: Member views but doesn’t read

“Same as above, but this time they’re logged in to a member account. They will be counted as a member view in your story stats, but if they hit the back button or close the tab or swipe away from the story before 30 seconds, it will not count towards earnings.”

For your account to be credited, members must view and read for 30 seconds. You must let your intro be strong enough to seize members at least for 30 seconds.

Scenario 4: Member view and read, no engagements

“Same as above, but this time they do stay on the page for at least 30 seconds. This means that they will also be counted as a member read and their time reading will count towards your earnings.”

Members view and read for 30 seconds indicates that, you earn for the 30 seconds read but not the view. The caveat here is that, member readers must stay for a minimum of 30 seconds for your account to be credited.

Scenario 5: Member view, read, and some engagements

“Same as above, but in addition to being read, they also give the story 10 claps, highlight 2 sentences, and leave a response. For a given reader, it doesn’t matter how many claps, highlights, or response they give, but each will increase earnings for the story the first time they happen.”

The above scenarios are coming from Medium’s help pages and spells out the conditions under which they credit your account with earning points.

Let’ Examine this Carefully;

“…..it doesn’t matter how many claps, highlights, or response they give, but each will increase earnings for the story the first time they happen.”

Examining from the 5th scenario above, it means that, earnings from comments, claps, and highlights only accrue to your account the first time they happened and not the number of times they happened.

It goes therefore to say that, one clap is as good as 10 claps when it comes to earning; though the numbers also give readers the indication of how interested readers are in that topic it does not necessarily increase the credits accordingly but just the first one.

3. Adjustments Application to the Points

Adjustment 1: Boost Bonus

“Boost is open to all authors across all topic categories.

The criteria that community members and Medium internal curation team use to nominate stories for boosting is an expression of their mission to elevate the best personal essays, hidden life wisdom, and deep knowledge that is locked up in each and every one of us.

Because they believe in it so strongly, they are not only increasing its distribution across Medium, but will also be giving reads and engagements from members an additional earnings bonus. This will be proportional to the engagement points earned, and the number of members who engaged with your stories.”

Boost bonus has more to do with the discretional powers of the examining team. This makes it difficult to determine which article or story may match the category that they use for boosting. As writers, we just have to ensure we put our best foot forward.

Adjustment 2: Adjustments Based on Read-Through-Rate

“After all of the above engagement points and bonuses have been applied for a given story on a given day, we do one last adjustment to help correct for clickbait and other forms of attention grabbing that the story ultimately wasn’t able to deliver on.

Stories with a lower than average read-through rate will be adjusted down in earnings, and stories with a higher than average read-through rate will be adjusted up in earnings. Read-through rate is calculated as:

Total number of members who read your story for 30+ seconds / Total number of members who loaded your story

Note that this isn’t about scrolling to the bottom of the page, and also doesn’t punish longer stories that have longer estimated reading times.

It’s really about that first 30 seconds on the page which we believe is enough time for a reader to assess whether or not a story will deliver on the promise of the title and preview.”

I don’t have much to say about this but you can add your own take in the comments.

4. Medium’s Take On SEO

“The heart of Medium’s mission is to deepen understanding, and we believe the best way to accomplish that mission is to be an open platform -- a place where anyone can have a voice, regardless of background, affiliation, or expertise.

To protect that mission, it is imperative that we have systems in place to support the success of creators who are here to share ideas and connect with readers, and discourage creators who are solely leveraging Medium for search engine optimization (in plainer words: spam and self-serving clickbait).

Medium limits content that is made available to third-party search engines, as well as Medium’s native search and topic pages.

The overwhelming majority of content that Medium will no longer be allowing to be indexed is what most people would consider spam, and the net effect will be more traffic to quality content long-term.

This system, similar to Google’s Page Rank, is based on a number of internal signals that help us determine if your use of Medium is above board.

It may take a little bit of time for you as a creator to become a trusted part of the Medium network and meet the threshold for being indexed, but if your stories meet our basic quality threshold, they will end up in external and native search indexes.

We encourage you to continue publishing your best writing on Medium, engaging with other users by clapping, following, and responding, and becoming a part of the Medium community.

This will greatly benefit the SEO for Medium creators who are publishing stories that align with our mission.

Medium will be sharing less of the content that we don’t want on Medium with Google, so Medium’s Google Page Rank will continuously improve as click-through rates from search queries increase, and this will result in legitimate Medium creators ranking higher across all Google searches.

This will lead to even more discovery of the stories and ideas that you publish on Medium.”

Conclusion:

So there you have it.

To increase your earnings on Medium you know what you have to do.

1. Craft your stories so that your readers will spend the first 30 seconds reading.

2. Claps, comments and highlight does not affect your income in their numbers apart from the first.

3. External readers only show as statistics on your dashboards but does not add to earning

4. More engagement will cause the platform to trust you and give you more SEO exposure

5. Listening in big chunks is what accrues to earnings as against smaller listening at a time.

6. Medium earnings comes purely from partner members only