Writing
My Medium Experience in 2022
It was a roller coaster!
I came back to Medium in May of 2022. My goal was to write more, maybe earn little money, and maybe learn to enjoy writing again. My experience on Medium last year was all of those things and more.
Since May, I have gained over 900 followers. Which, using math, should mean everything I write gets at least 970 reads. I learned it doesn’t work that way. Why do people follow writers they never read? Granted, I sometimes miss essays written by the people I follow, but I do try and catch up. The whole follower thing confused me in 2022 and will continue to confuse me in 2023.
I made some money. Not a lot of money, but I wasn’t expecting to make a lot of money. I don’t have the patience to create a Substack and a Linked In and I’d rather drink goat urine than have anything to do with Twitter and I just don’t want to spend hours and hours every day promoting myself.
Some of my writing did very well. This piece about Majorie Taylor Greene has almost 7,000 views and earned over $300.
I struggle to comprehend those numbers. Yes, it’s a funny little op-ed, but it’s not great. It’s not powerful. It’s just some screenshots, a little humor, and MTG’s own wacky words.
My husband believes this poem is the best thing I’ve ever written.
The stats for “Oh, the Places You’ll Go Where You Won’t Get Shot” are really low: 255 reads, and it earned less than $3.00.
What did I learn from comparing the stats for these two pieces of writing? I learned that even after writing online for nearly 20 years, I still do not understand anything. Why that MTG piece did so much better than the poem is so confusing to me. The poem took me hours to compose, the cadence had to be perfect, and I spent over an hour trying to find the perfect featured image.
The MTG thing took me about half an hour to put together.
Oh, I also had a temper tantrum, threw a few pity paragraphs together, and angrily hit publish. That piece of dreck has about 2,000 views and is still earning a few pennies every week.
I don’t feel I am going to have a lightbulb moment in 2023 regarding how views and reads work on Medium. Or really online in general. I’ve never understood why some things do well while others die a lonely, unread death.
I’m still going to write because I love to write. I also believe I’m pretty good at it. And since I am not trying to make a living here on Medium, I can write once a day or once a week, or even once a month. I can write about whatever I want, too, which is why I like Medium so much.
Hope you stick around. I think 2023 might be a good year.
