My First Viral Story on Medium Made $57.63 (and counting)

I still can’t believe that I earned this amount even after the first week of writing on Medium seriously…I shared some tips to do the same!

My first viral story on Medium happened after 1 week of being active on the platform.

Also read: My First Week on Medium: I Earned $19.58 and Got 47 Followers

I signed up for Medium in 2021 (if you will check it), but I was not really active because my country was not listed in the Medium Partner Program.

But recently, I learned that we are now listed and can finally earn money from it—as writers, this is a huge opportunity to start earning money from our content.

I can’t believe that after one week of being active, I wrote a viral story that earned me $57.63 (and still counting).

Here’s the secret, I always try to use my stats to learn what is going viral on my stories — which is working and which is not, then I write those topics that has a potential to go viral!

Also read: I Hacked the Medium Stats — How I Use It To Improve My Writing?

The story was posted last December 14, 2024, with 3 minutes of reading time, and 5k claps.

It is amazing that when you visited the story, it has only one line that has no highlight, which means every reader who visited it actually highlighted almost the whole post.

Breakdown of the stats

As of writing, this story has 3.1k views, 1.97k reads, $57.63 earnings, and a 63% read ratio.

I had my peak earnings of $20.77 after 3 days of posting the story and total peak views of 833 views (458 for members and 375 for non-members) after 4 days of posting.

On December 17, 2024 (3 days after posting), I had my total peak reads of 531 reads (423 for members and 108 for non-members) leaving me a 67% read ratio on that day.

For the engagement, I managed to have 396 total clappers, 155 new followers, 79 highlighters, and 200 responders.

The traffic source was 54% from the Medium itself and 46% on external referrals which were mostly from email and direct links.

I never expected this amount of earnings and engagements on this story before posting it. It just happened for 1 week — and what’s surprising is that I am getting more engagements as the day goes by and it helps me to earn more.

I am still figuring out and analyzing my stats so you can write a killer blog post on Medium (this might be my next post, so wait!).

I will be sharing my overall earnings for this month by the end of the month or when the year starts — this could help everyone decide on how to write a viral story.

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If you want to learn more about how to grow your audience on Medium, you can always visit my website and subscribe to my email list to be the first one to know the updates!