| I have nothing to say about Medium, but if someone indeed can make $1K with a couple of articles about an arcane subject, then by all means do it. You will not make the money it costs to run the web server of your own blog by writing a couple of posts a month. To make some money, you will need several posts per day, on a hot subject, and you will have to promote it all day long. I was editor-in-chief of a large, well-known website for many years, and I know what I am talking about. We paid our contributors $25 a piece, that's how much it was worth. Later on, we could get away with paying nothing. I know people with well-read and well-maintained websites who received $20 a month from Google Ads. For a website to receive some traction, you must be at it for years, and after a few years, pay per clicks will be lower. Websites grow with abandon, but advertising budgets don't. So the advertising dollars are split into smaller, and smaller pieces. Serious advertising money goes into microtargeting, no more target groups, but target persons. For that, you must be a Facebook et al. Basically, the times of making serious money with writing are over. I have many well-known journalist friends, and they hurt. Their numbers dwindle. I was lucky, I made serious money decades ago by writing – as a copywriter for ad agencies. Even that doesn’t pay as royally as it used to. But to make a living with writing, you need to "go to the dark side," into advertising, PR, best to the PR department of a large company with long-term job security and health insurance. Forget the easy money with your own website. Use it to build your brand, to advertise yourself, to put together a portfolio of your work, an interactive business card. But forget the easy money with your own website. |