If You Have Less Than 100 Followers, You Have No Business Talking About Making Money on Medium

Photo by Kats Weil on Unsplash

So, Medium decided to change the rules and the entire community went burst.

It said you must have a minimum of 100 followers to be eligible to earn.

It’s old news but the effect still carried on.

In fact, it’s getting tougher because Medium gave us all till December to garner 100 followers.

October is wrapping up and writers are getting nervous.

Ironically, the writers getting nervous would probably earn nothing at the end of the year even if they pass the 100 mark.

How much can you possibly make with 100 followers or 200 followers?

Writers who earn and who should be concerned about earning have left that stage. They have thousands of followers already.

What are you thinking as a new writer? To get your 100 followers and keep earning your $0.34 a month.

I am From Nigeria

Even If I have 100 thousand followers and get 1M views every month, I would still earn nothing from Medium. Stripe is yet to be on our soil.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been undisturbed about the news.

But even if I’m eligible to earn I would still not be disturbed.

Heres the thing:

Many people come to Medium just to read and enjoy the vast creativity on the platform. They probably publish their own stories once or twice in a while. They don’t care about building an audience or a career in writing.

Outside that category of people, if I have less than 100 followers, I’m one of the bottom 1% of writers on the platform.

My goal won’t really be about getting 100 followers and dropping the bat.

I’d forget about the whole follower thing and just keep writing.

I’d forget that I could earn from the platform and build myself.

Apparently, I’m the wrong person to say this. As of writing this article I have exactly 10 followers.

But I won’t still do the follow for follow that’s eating up the platform.

I don’t want to read your article because you read mine. Neither should you mine.

I don’t want to follow you because you follow me.

You should read my article because my title captivated you. You should follow me because you feel my subsequent article would make sense to you.

This is Medium, not Twitter.

Well, It’s good to support each other as writers. I would definitely appreciate your support. But not in a follow-for-follow manner. Tell me my article sucks and how I can improve it.

Or if you like, blow my head with praises.

Medium Is Probably Sad Right Now

I imagine that Medium put the rules to get us to work harder. To get us to write good headlines and intros.

Or it probably hurts them sending $0.03 to thousands of writers every month.

Making money is our ultimate. It is the ultimate of every human. Of every writer. In fact, making money writing has made writing a more enticing art in the past years.

But it hurts the business if we are too bull-headed on making the money.

Maybe as new writers, we should let the change sink in. Not getting 100 followers before December doesn't rule you out from earning forever.

Let Medium be Medium.

Follow for follow might get you to 100 followers but it won’t get you to 1,000.