How Much Can I Make As A Writer for Cantor’s Paradise? (2024)

Writing for Cantor’s Paradise

There appears to be an endless supply of stories purporting to explain what the earning potential for writers on Medium is. The recipe for such posts seem to be: 1. Show off the stats for a unicorn story; 2. Extrapolate that if a writer publishes one such story per week, in a year he/she will earn the equivalent of 52 unicorns. This will not be one of those posts.

In this story we will present real statistics which you as a writer can use to estimate what you can expect to to earn if you decide to write for Cantor’s Paradise.

• In our first year of operations (2019–20), writers earned $25,688 in royalties through Cantor’s Paradise, with average earnings of $597 and median earnings of $38 per writer.
• On average, writers were paid $0.055 per word published.
• 100% of writers enrolled in the Medium Partner Program earned money. This constituted 70% of writers overall. 66.7% of such writers earned more than $100 and 16.7% earned more than $1,000.
• Among writers who only wrote one story, the average earning for that story was $64 and the median earning was $43.
• The median earnings per 1000 views was $20.81
• The median earnings per 1000 words was $32.87
• The median earnings per writer per day was $0.51

The numbers presented in this story are based on the first year of operations (June 2019–20) of Cantor’s Paradise, and include stats about 213 stories from 43 different writers, as of the 7th of July 2020:

• The median writer wrote 2 stories. The average number of stories per writer was 4.9 stories. The writer who wrote the most, wrote 53 stories. The five most prolific writers wrote 116 stories. 18 writers wrote only one story.
• The median story (in terms of earnings) earned $57, was 1,104 words long and had 1,700 views. 106 stories earned less than this, and 106 stories earned more.
• The average earning per story was $147. Of the highest earning stories (two standard deviations above the mean), the average story length was 4,120 words. Of the lowest earning stories (two standard deviations below the mean), the average story length was 1,118 words.

In total, CP writers earned $25,688 in royalties, amounting to $0.055 per word published.

One way of measuring expected earnings is by performance, measured in views. Views have historically been part of the algorithm Medium uses to estimate your earnings, alongside reads, read time, claps, comments and more. Lately, read time has mattered more.

Of the 175 stories that were opted into Medium’s Partner Program (and so were eligible to earn money from their story):

• The median earnings per 1000 views was $20.81
• The highest earnings per 1000 views was $75.57
• The lowest earnings per 1000 views was $0.58

The distribution of earnings per 1000 views was as follows (below). As can be seen, the vast majority of stories earned between $5 and $40 per 1000 views, with minor subsets of outliers on either side of the distribution.

What does this mean for me as a writer?

For you as a writer, this statistic means that if you consider yourself to be able to write stories which perform better than half of the stories thus far published in CP (which earned royalties), you can expect to earn more than $20.81 per 1000 views.

Performance is not the only way to estimate expected earnings. Another variable is story length. Although not a part of Medium’s algorithm directly, story length contributes to read time, which is part of Medium’s algorithm. If you are able to keep the attention of our audience for longer, you can expect to earn more. However, it must be said it is also possible to do this with shorter stories (such as, for instance the essay “How to Solve the Rubix’ Cube”), depending on the topic.

Of the 175 stories that opted into Medium’s Partner Program (and so were eligible to earn money from their story):

• The median earnings per 1000 words was $32.87
• The highest earnings per 1000 words was $1,100.61
• The lowest earnings per 1000 words was $0.83

The distribution of earnings per 1000 words was as follows (below). As can be seen, the vast majority of stories earned between $10 and $100 per 1000 words written, with fairly significant subsets of stories both above and below this range, from $1–10 per 1000 words (27 stories) and from $100–1100 per 1000 words (27 stories).

What does this mean for me as a writer?

For you as a writer, this statistic means that if you if you consider yourself to be able to write stories which appeal more to our audience than half of the stories thus far published in CP (which earned royalties), you can expect to earn more than $32.87 per 1000 words you write.

Advantages to writing longer stories include: 1. The possibility of longer retention of readers and 2. The possibility of better SEO (as there are more words indexed by search engines). Disadvantages to writing longer stories include: 1. Opportunity costs, longer stories often take more time to write and 2. Lower ratio of views/reads, as more people will “fall off” before finishing your story.

Finally, let’s take a look at how much you as a writer can expect to earn from your story per day. This is a fairly tricky metric to express. Firstly, the stories included in the sample have all been published at different times, and so the statistics range over 300 days for some stories, but only 14 days for others. Secondly, as a rule, stories tend to gain most of their earnings in the first 10 days of publication, barring some exceptions which are very important for the topics we cover in CP. Namely, math stories can be evergreen and keep earning long after being published. Several of the top stories in Cantor’s Paradise still earn $5–10 per day, despite being over six months old.

To account for these limitations, the following metrics are based on stories which were published more than 30 days ago. This excluded 5 stories included in the previous metrics. Thus, of the 170 stories in CP that opted into Medium’s Partner Program (and so were eligible to earn money from their story):

• The median earnings per day was $0.51
• The highest earnings per day was $9.58
• The lowest earnings per day was $0.01

The distribution of earnings per day was as follows (below). As can be seen, the vast majority of stories included earned somewhere between ten cents and $1 per day, however with significant subsets earning between $0–0.1 per day (16 stories) and between $1-$10 (52 stories).

What does this mean for me as a writer?

For you as a writer, this statistic means that if you if you consider yourself to be able to write stories which both perform (in terms of Medium’s algorithm) and have a longer shelf life than the stories we have published so far, you can expect to you can expect to earn more than $0.51 per day from your story.

As Cantor’s Paradise’ Medium audience has grown (from 267 followers in June of 2019 to more than 10,000 followers in October of 2020) earnings have steadily gone up. This partly because we have grown external audiences simultaneously (~25k followers on Facebook, ~6k newsletter subscribers).

Although our publishing frequency in the last year has increased from approximately 6–10 stories to 25–30 stories per month, we still remain dedicated to emphasizing quality over quantity. We would rather publish less frequently than lower our standards.

Do you want to write for Cantor’s Paradise? Send us an email!