by Thor Galle on Feb. 23, 2021, with additions on Feb. 24

This write-up combines a few insights from research on how much Medium pays their readers, and how this might compare with Readup. Note that the sources are so far limited. It is very much a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

How does Medium pay writers now?

See official information from https://medium.com/earn, with more info on a help page (Readup / direct link).

Partner Program writers are paid monthly based on how much time Medium members spend reading their stories. The longer members read, the more writers earn.

In addition, part of each member’s subscription is distributed in proportion to their reading time every month. So if a member spent 10% of their time reading your story, you’d receive 10% of their revenue share.

In this FAQ statement, it is not transparent what "their revenue share" means. Elsewhere, Medium elaborates "of their share (a portion of their subscription fee)".

A Medium Member pays 5$ per month. This information does not say how much of that 5$ is the portion that will be allowed to writers. What cut does Medium take? Do they distribute 4$ of the 5$ to writers? 3$ ? 2$? We can't know.

From Tech Crunch in 2019 (Readup / direct link):

The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps.

And there are still other metrics than "reading time" entering the equation, such as claps.

With Readup, it is unambiguously 90% of the reader revenue that will shared with writers. Better yet, the exact amounts that readers pay to writers, and the exact amounts that writers receive will be visible (to respectively the reader privately, and publicly for the writer compensations). This transparency is similar to the proven model of Open Collective. Readup has a serious edge here.

Reverse engineering from actual data

Let's try to get a better approximation of real numbers. I found this blog from Zulie helpful: Readup link | direct link.

Zulie earned 38$ per 1000 views on a story that she mentions was particularly popular. The story was 21 minutes long.

But this was a popular story. Let's say that a high average is 30$ per 1000 views of a similar story.

From a reading time perspective perspective, looking at her daily breakdown, Zulie's Medium daily "Member reading time" resulted in 3 - 3.5 cents earned per read minute (fair warning: Medium explicitly mentions that this kind of calculation won't be accurate).

Now let's take Bill's 98 cents share for the 15$ Readup subscription for a 25 min article from Lauren Oyler (Readup Blog). Bill's share for Zulie's aticle could have been about 80 cents if that story would have been the same 21 minutes long as Zulie's one ((0.98/25) * 21).