Exploring Technical Writing: The Taste of Online Money
This post is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Exploring Technical Writing”.
You can pre-order the book at 50% discount — https://rudrank.gumroad.com/l/technical-writing/pre-order
“When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” — Oscar Wilde
After publishing the first article on Medium in 2019, I learned that Medium has a program that pays you for the views from the paid members. This was a new opportunity that changed my perspective on writing. Get paid to write about what you love! I yearned to earn my first dollar online via writing.
During my college end-semester exams, I wanted to do everything except study. I decided to channel this energy into writing. I started writing a few more articles. At that time, I did not know what to write, and I was exploring many open-source projects and libraries for my app. So, I created a few curation articles instead of focusing on a particular topic or a tutorial. Like “5 SwiftUI Open-Source Projects to Use in Your Next App”.
Joining the Medium Partner Program
The program, called as the Medium Partner Program, probably commenced in November of 2019. I joined on November 20th just to try out my luck and hope to earn some bucks for my coffee addiction at college. Little did I know that this decision would lead to my first taste of online money. Under the Medium Partner Program, I wrote my first article, “Playing with Combine: Grid Layout in SwiftUI.” This article became eligible to earn money and was included in the metered paywall, allowing readers to pay for access or view it as part of their monthly subscription. And subsequently, I made my other articles eligible under the metered paywall.
These posts were a hit. I still do not know why, but I can guess that developers do not want to do the hard research and are happy to have a post that curates the popular tested projects. This way, they save time on the research and cherry-pick the project they like. The impressions on these articles, plus the Google SEO effect, were huge, with tens of thousands of views.
The Disappointment
However, my excitement was short-lived when I received an email on December 13th stating they could not pay me for my earnings. The reason was that Stripe, the payment processing platform, was still under preview for India. I did not have anything to lose despite the disappointment.
The Unexpected Twist
Surprisingly, Medium made a one-time payment through PayPal for the money I had earned. However, it was a temporary solution before shutting down the Medium Partner Program in India. I made $92.73 from Medium in the first month of writing!
That was a lot of money for me as a college student in India. That was a month of food and coffee expenses for me. I know people from NYC cannot comprehend this, but this taste of online money from writing was delicious.
This experience opened my eyes to the possibilities of earning income through my passion. While it has been four years since the Medium Partner Program shut down, I am grateful for it for providing a platform for writers like me to showcase our work and earn recognition. It turned out to be a stepping stone towards realising the potential of online writing and its opportunities.
