Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Now I'm Just Confused

 When it comes to Medium, I'm always getting thrown a curveball. For the entire time I've had work on the platform, every time I think I have something figured out, the opposite happens. Like today when I checked my monthly earnings. After making a few strides last fall, I ended up with only $0.03 earnings in November and a big fat $0 in December. I thought this meant that impactful and lasting royalties came from non-fiction content rather than the creative content I had been posting. So I started the A Taste of Money series and nothing. Few reads, no bites from paying members. Then I post another poem from last year's prompts, and I immediately earn $0.03 in a day. After about eight days, I end up earning $0.10. Go figure. 

I know that this doesn't account for all of the other variables that dictate who gets paid and for what, but this is showing me that it would be much easier to stick with poetry that I know I can put in publications (that aren't of my own creation) and get things moving. 



In other jumbles of confusion, one of the platforms I create content for (day job stuff) has completely changed its ways, leaving me without a clear picture of my future with them. What was once a great place to come and go as I pleased for work has now turned into a highly competitive cutthroat environment. While it helps for writers' work to to sell faster, it's leaving me without a way to grab the work that I want and get it done without the fear of someone coming up and writing an article out from under me before I get my thoughts together. I worked for this platform specifically because you had a choice between being highly competitive and taking the slower route, giving customers the content they wanted without twenty other people trying to steal it from you. 

So how do I make these changes work for me? I don't know, because it looks like to get the work I want, it's going to be a game of waiting until midnight on the first of each month to grab something before someone else gets it. Not only claim it, but actually sit and write it as soon as I get it. That just doesn't work for me. And because of the rules on these new changes, it is up to the individual clients to change the way they buy work for it to resemble the platform I used to know and love. I know it's only been a couple of days so far, but if it continues to look like I can't even attempt a consistent work pattern on the platform, I would probably be better off concentrating on creative work that is less likely to pay the way this work did, but would remove a huge level of stress. Did I ever tell you about my love/hate relationship with change? 

1 comment:

K R Smith said...

Just to let you know, my traffic on Medium has been down, too - a lot. Not sure if it's because I haven't been posting much or people are on the platform as often now. I guess I'm a little confused, too!