How Much My Very First Medium Article With 52K Views Made

Not as much as you’d think. Let’s take a closer look to see why.

How the article below made it rain in my wallet — Photo by cottonbro via Pexels

The very first piece I published to Medium was in 2017. It’s a 10-minute read introducing an expense tracking template that worked well for me. Of course free links to the template are included, right at the top of the article.

At the time of publishing, I didn’t have a single follower and was probably following very few people myself. For the first half a year after publishing, nothing happened. One lone reader occasionally ended up on the article. That’s it.

Around August 2018, more viewers started dripping in. The daily viewer count increased from 1 to… a whopping 8 or 13! These numbers slowly continued to climb up to mid-2019. Traffic has now stabilised and remains consistent, despite this version of the template not being up-to-date.

Now. Stats.

Take note of the ratio internal (green) vs. external (blue) views. Of the 52K lifetime views, the majority, 96% and 50K, is external.

Lifetime views for the expense tracking article.