What Makes My Articles Unique? Part 3: Don’t Expect to Earn a Living from Writing
Earnings from technical blogging, for most bloggers, are small. Yet, I have published ~500 quality articles over the past 3.5 years.
A repost of my past article on Medium.
Every writer’s blog is unique in its own way unless it is plagiarised. I’m simply highlighting my unique aspects.
Part 1: Originally for my daughter and myself
Part 2: Not striving to be a Techfluencer
Part 3: Don’t Expect to Earn a Living from Writing
Part 4: From rare combinations of experience, hands-on experience in various roles (planned)
Part 5: Being Direct and unafraid to say what others won’t, and most of my predictions are later proven correct, (planned)
Part 6: Responding to Public Requests for Assistance on E2E Test Automation (planned)
Nearly all my articles are behind the Medium Paywall, i.e., only paid Medium Members (~$5/month, currently on special $4) can read them (please note, a paid Medium member can read articles from all authors). Naturally, people would think, “Zhimin, you are trying to make good money from your articles.” You can find my answer in this article, and you’ll likely gain a better understanding of earnings from writing in technical fields on Medium.
For readers wondering, “Zhimin, why don’t you make your articles free to the public?”, please stay tuned for Part 6.
Firstly, the odds of earning a significant income from writing are low. For technical articles, the odds are much lower.
Having said that, there are elite bloggers who earn a good income on a public platform. These are edge cases.
“1% of authors, who account for nearly a third of all UK book sales” — source
As an author of 12 technical eBooks, I was well aware that earning good money from technical blogs is nearly impossible before blogging. My main topics, such as End-to-End Test Automation and Continuous Testing, are still currently considered “cold fields” in software development. This is the sad reality despite test automation and CT being the foundation of Agile.
Since publishing my first article on Medium in January 2021, I have written around 500 high-quality articles. However, the earnings I’ve received from Medium are tiny compared to the effort I’ve invested in other endeavours. (Why am I still persistently doing this? see Part 1 and the coming parts in this series)
In this article, I am talking about earnings from technical blogging.
Share My Earnings of Writing Technical Articles on Medium
Prior to August 2023, I had hoped to make some passive income from writing. I even set a goal of earning an average of $1000 monthly by 2025. However, the change of the Medium Partner Program smashed that.
As you can see, I had a relatively static growing monthly income up to 2023–07.
The new change fundamentally removed or changed (for worse) the reward scheme for the writers on Medium:
No more Referral bonus.
(The ongoing monthly referral bonus, approximately $2 per month per referred member, continued as long as the referred maintains member status. No new referrals have occurred since July 2023. The previous referrals have naturally diminished. Within one year, this has declined by approximately 45% from its peak.)No longer based on Members’ reading time.
(The old algorithm was fair, now it gets more complicated, with less reward for high-quality content)Past quality articles seem to be getting much less weight.
(After the change, the money received from my past articles is almost negligible)30-second minimum reading time to be counted as a read.
(this particularly hurts my style, as I provide many links in my article for readers; I write long articles, typically, ~1000 words. The new change favours short articles)
In the first month following the adjustment, my income dropped to 57% of its previous level (compared to July). Subsequently, in the second month, it further decreased to 45%! Given the consistent upward trend until 2023–07 and my consistent publication of more articles, what a shocking shift!
Let me share the money I received in March 2024 from six new Medium articles published in February 2024: a total of $11.64, which is under the $2 average.
These articles may still generate some passive income in the future. However, under the new scheme, the past articles have contributed minimally. If my primary goal in blogging was money, I might have quit or altered my writing style.
Decline ALL commercial collaborations
With some degree of recognition within the Test Automation community, I received commercial collaboration requests/proposals, asking me to endorse products or services in exchange for compensation. I declined all. My reason is super simple: I don’t like ads, and won’t recommend a commercial test automation product unless I have been using it on a daily basis for a few years.
Also, there were no affiliated links in my articles, never had.
ALL the opinions in my articles are 100% mine.
Some skeptical readers may comment, “You frequently promoted Selenium Ruby and your tools TestWise & BuildWise.” Selenium WebDriver is free and built on a W3C standard, while Ruby is a widely used scripting language that is also free. Advocating for them does not bring me any financial gain. I use TestWise and BuildWise daily, with a proven track record spanning over a decade. Creating them does not inherently imply bias, akin to Linus Torvalds promoting Git. In my view, advocating for effective tools that people use daily personally, as long as there is no vendor locking, is completely acceptable.
Additionally, the award-winning BuildWise server is entirely free and open-source. TestWise IDE and BuildWise Agent offer a free mode (fully-featured) with only minor inconveniences. Put simply, TestWise and BuildWise don’t lock you into a specific vendor; you can attain considerable success in Test Automation without paying a cent.
If my intention were to promote TestWise/BuildWise, I would make the majority of my articles available for free instead of earning an average of a few dollars per article on Medium.
I’ve always believed that only a small percentage of SETs, with the right mindset, determination, and persistence, can truly master end-to-end test automation. A willingness to pay $5/month is a simple litmus test. It helps me filter out some of the casual inquiries I receive.
This article is not meant to discourage people from technical blogging. It’s simply a reality check, using myself as an example. There are many benefits for software professionals who write regularly. I encouraged my daughter to do so, and she became a published book author last year.
If your articles are selected by Medium curators as ‘Boosted’ (which requires both high quality and some luck, as only about 0.2% of new articles are boosted), Below are my four ‘Boosted’ articles”, and their total earnings as of 2024–07.
🎖 ️A Tale of a Deceptive End-to-End Test Automation Engineer, $253
🎖 ️Waiting Strategies for Test Steps in Web Test Automation, $58
Clearly, “Boosted” helps increase earnings, quite a bit, but only for a short period (~2 weeks).
You might also hit the jackpot, with luck, with a popular topic (usually less technical). For example, my top-earning article, ‘What Happened to ThoughtWorks?’, was a response to my daughter’s question, sharing a bit of ThoughtWorks history that many current-generation software professionals are unaware of. I was surprised by how well it was received.
Some readers might think, “Zhimin, the earnings from your articles are too low, even those Boosted ones. You could surely earn much more by writing for others.” Yes, I’m aware of that, as I’ve received and declined several invitations. I’ll explain this in detail in a separate article. Money is not the primary reason to keep me writing, at least for the foreseeable future.
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