Why I Keep Writing for Only $20 a Month

There’s a difference between those of us on Medium who are writing for profit versus those of us who are only making a few bucks a month

Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

A decade ago, writing became something that I really began pouring my heart and soul into. I used writing as a vessel for expressing my emotions and documenting my experiences as a twenty-something year-old living in New York City.

I started a Wordpress blog for fun, with no real focus or genre around the topics that I was writing about. My blog posts were merely the ramblings of a lost millennial who was still trying to find her purpose in life — and to be honest, not much has changed.

Given the substantial amount of student loan debt I had accrued from my four years as an undergrad, I had never considered writing to ever become a means of any real source of income (not for me, at least). After all, I had neither the experience nor the degree to show for it.

Regardless, I still wanted to write.

And so, writing continued to be a hobby for me — a leisurely activity that I took up whenever I found the spare time after the long work day or whenever I had something really pressing on my mind that I needed to rant about.

I eventually discovered Medium and was quickly seduced by its user-friendly experience, the ease in which I could publish anything, and the large community of aspiring, like-minded Writers such as myself. It was an exciting opportunity, I had thought.

As time went on, I finally decided to invest in Medium and pay into the partner program due to the amount of time I’d spend reading and writing articles. I figured $5 per month was well worth it.

And just like that, I was introduced to the thrill of actually making money for the things that I wrote. The thing I thought was once utterly impossible, a pipe dream, was finally presenting itself to be a window of hope and opportunity. The idea that writing can actually be transactional was now a reality. It took time of course — as does anything in life — however, that window of hope was very short-lived.