Jill Ebstein very funny! I am on a similar boat with you! I have not paid Medium since January as my occasional writing seems to cover the $5 cost with a $2 tip for me! LOL. It’s really funny to think of Medium as a platform to make money. A dozen year ago, my writing advances were 10–30K in the early days. :) Hack every July, publishers like Wiley sent me a birthday gift worth few hundred bucks!

Jill I know how you feel. We are either doing this for fun or experimentation or both! But I want to share an idea with you that might be another interesting experiment to consider.

So far, my Medium writing hasn’t been focused on a niche. I have tried random topics and angle to explore.

This summer to assist my fifth grader son with learning computer science, I decided to create a publication called the Elementary Computer Science in both Medium and in a outside website of my own. I have pitched the idea to a few friends with similar age children who were planning to get online paid courses — I told them that I will personally create a highly targeted content plan for my son and will share it for anyone in the world as I feel online courses in this area are boring and often weak in foundations.

So my big publishing experiment while helping my son and a few friends’s kids will be to see the traction I get directly on my website vs Medium. I know Medium is almost unreachable by kids due to age restrictions on creating account so it won’t be a fair comparison but I want to see how the content works directly and on Medium.

To promote my content, I will use FB and Instagram. The goal is publish same content on two different platforms — medium and a personal website (aka blog) and pump traffic using word of mouth and social media. To see if Medium is worth spending my time on or should I build my audience in the wide open.