Do You Earn More If You Are a Friend of Medium?

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I didn’t renew my Friend of Medium subscription last March because of the frenzy and my belief that the novelty would soon wear off and earnings drop.

The frenzy caused writers to use many different methods to get my attention. I believe that the introduction of Friends of Medium encouraged behaviour that led to some writers having their accounts suspended.

This graph shows my earnings for my first year as a Medium member starting in March 2024. The earnings shot up when I became a Friend of Medium in December, but they plummeted in January and crashed in February.

The December earnings more than paid for a Friend of Medium’s monthly subscription but in February the earnings would only have paid for a Member’s monthly subscription.

See Why I’m Cancelling Friend of Medium and My Medium Membership for more information.

How are your earnings calculated?

How much you earn depends on Medium’s algorithm which isn’t transparent. So, much of what I have written in this article is based on my assumptions.

However, one thing is certain — you don’t earn anything from being a Friend of Medium or Member! Your earnings come from people reading and interacting with your stories.

Friends of Medium was introduced so that:

• four times more earnings could be awarded to writers and
• Friends of Medium could share any story with anyone else.

You only get four times the earnings if it is a Friend of Medium who reads/responds to your story.

There was some confusion about how the sharing worked so I wrote Do You Earn When You Share Your ‘Friend of Medium’ Links? which, hopefully, made it clearer.

So, how much do you get when someone reads and interacts with your stories? It will only be a small proportion of their subscription.

As a Member, my average monthly earnings per read are $0.02 — only 0.4 per cent of a Member’s monthly subscription!

When I was a Friend of Medium, my average monthly earnings per read were $0.06 — also 0.4 per cent of the cost of subscribing.

So where does the rest of the money go?

Medium’s share

No doubt, Medium takes its share. They don’t tell us how much, but I suspect it’s in the region of 10 per cent — the same as Substack’s.

Transaction fees

There will also be transaction fees for your Partner Program’s payout. By the way, Medium has recently announced that you won’t get your Partner Program earnings until you have accrued $10 worth.

The ‘Dilution Effect’

The amount you earn when a Member or Friend of Medium reads and interacts with your stories depends on how many others they have read and interacted with.

I don’t know how Medium’s algorithm works but my theory is that they divide the daily equivalent of the reader’s subscription by the number of stories they have read. Medium’s share and the transaction fees are then subtracted.

This is why you have to wait at least 24 hours before you can see your Partner Program earnings for the previous day.

Theoretically, your story can earn more if it is read by a Member rather than a Friend of Medium.

Earnings

These figures are based on my year’s earnings from August 2023 until July 2024.

My average monthly earnings before joining FoM was $3.13. They were $11.70 while I was a Friend of Medium and $2.58 after cancelling my Friend of Medium subscription.

The drop in earnings after the cancellation was probably due to changing my reading and writing strategies. See My New Reading and Writing Strategies for Medium for more information.

Conclusions

My earnings are small and I keep reminding myself that the subscription provides me with reading material and rewards other writers. I now consider any income a reduction in my membership fee.

Before I wrote this article, I had no plans to become a Friend of Medium again. Now, I’m not sure. After the peak and dip, the Friend of Medium environment might have stabilised.