How does Medium actually pay you?

The formula Medium uses to calculate how much you earn for your story.

I recently got enrolled in the Partner Program for Medium writers and after some extensive research and through my own experiences, I’m going to describe how and what you get paid for when writing for Medium, and how much you can actually get paid.

Originally, Medium paid their writers based on views and reads, it then switched to claps (as a proportion of the reader’s total claps) and now it has changed again. Personally, I think the new system is best because it rewards the quality of the article rather than the writer’s quantity.

First, let’s describe each of the systems, how they work, and what you need to do to optimize the amount of money you earn with Medium’s new calculation for earnings.

#1 — Views and Reads

This was the original way writers were rewarded for their posts and it’s also the most obvious method that most people would guess they’d be paid. It’s the method YouTube and other platforms pay their creators but it doesn’t work too well on Medium. The primary reason is because writers who post maybe 10 average or decent-quality articles per week and much more likely to earn significantly more than a writer who spends time writing 1 very…