I recently started publishing articles on Medium, as you might have noticed. The reason for this is simple: I'm wondering how much money I can make with the kind of articles I like to write.
On this blog, I receive something like 10 EUR per year via paypal.me. By the way:
A big "Thank you" to the contributors!
In the cost list below, you can see that I loose about 66 EUR with my blog and my extra services. This is not even considering all the time I put into it.
Current Cost
Here you can see the costs I roughly have each year. It's only roughly because the prices and the exchange rage (USD ↔ EUR) change.
| Name | Cost | Description |
|---|---|---|
| martin-thoma.com | 14 EUR | Domain at namecheap.com |
| martin-thoma.de | 31 EUR | Domain+Hosting at hosting.de; here I have my main e-mail address |
| write-math.com | 14 EUR | Domain at namecheap.com |
| write-math.com | 17 EUR | Hosting at namecheap.com |
| Total | 76 EUR |
Export from Medium
Kudos for this to macropus!
Prerequisites
$ npm install -g mediumexporter
Export
$ mediumexporter https://medium.com/p/the-article > post.md
Sadly, you have to refine a lot:
- Tags
- Images have to be downloaded extra
- Source code is still on git
- Overall formatting
What is cool
- It's possible to get paid. Not by advertisement, but by subscription.
- The editor is pretty nice
- Publications give extra reach
- I don't have to care about hosting
Publications
I've now published in The Startup, Analytics Vidhya, Make it New and Python in Plain English.
The advantage of publications is that you can reach new readers. That is one reason why I'm trying to get into new publications. Also, it kind of resembles the categories I have. So readers can choose a publication by the topic they are interested in. In contrast, on my blog it's only me publishing articles.
I'm not quite sure how much quality assurance people do in the publications on Medium. I guess it depends on the publication. But at least the big ones seem to do have very rough glance at the articles.
What is not cool
- Missing Features: Syntax highlighting, MathJax, pre-commit.
- Publication Rules: One thing that annoys me is that you have to put a big stock image in the beginning of your article. It doesn't have to be related to the article at all. Do people really like that?
- Synchronization: I want to keep a copy of my articles so that I can easily find them again / publish them in another form. As I like to update my articles when I spot mistakes or just learn something new, this is quite a bit of work. Now I have to do it in two places.
- Comments and Discussions: I'm not sure how easy it is to comment and if I receive notifications.
Missing Features
In this blog, I can easily create beautifully syntax-highlighted code blocks by just using the fenced code block notation of Markdown. On Medium, I have to make a Github gist.
In this blog, I create mathematical formulas in a variety of different ways. Most of the time by the dollar notation for inline math and by the begin/end align or by double dollar / fenced code blocks for bigger formulas. So I can use the powerful LaTeX math notation. On Medium, I don't think this is possible at all. So I will not create anything math-related on Medium.
In this blog, I use blacken-docs
over my Python code snippets to make sure that they have a beautiful formatting
and don't have dumb typos. This is not possible with Medium.
Summary
I'm going to publish some articles on Medium, but I keep adding them here as well. I'm currently experimenting with adding a redirect from here, but you can always look directly in the source for free.
What do you think about it?