Medium is Causing Mental Health Issues!
I can completely see that… here’s my story
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I discovered Medium in 2019. It was a period of change in my life and I felt like I wanted to write again. And so I did.
Medium was an excellent “medium” for writing… if you’ll forgive the pun. At first, it was just a way for me to get back into writing again. It had been a while and the ease with which Medium let me set up a site was excellent.
Soon, I was firing off articles and getting views and claps. Medium is a fantastic platform for organic traffic. It’s so easy to find reach quickly.
I was lucky. I think my third article started to get a lot of attention. I hadn’t monetized at the time so, I wasn’t earning anything. But, the number of views itself was the reward.
The Views
This started to become something of an obsession.
Once I started to put articles behind the paywall, all I could do was check my stats every hour.
It wasn’t pleasant.
I saw cents coming in and at first it was very exciting but, in time it started to eat away at me and cause an inordinate amount of anxiety.
When I failed to get enough views and make enough money, I started to imagine that I was doing things wrong. I started looking at countless number of articles on how to write. There was so much advice out there on “How to Make Money on Medium”. It was blinding!
I pored over articles and websites on writing. Some of them were worth it. Some were such a waste of time. Some of them were just people rehashing content. I won’t say it was all a waste. I did learn quite a few things along the way.
The Endless Hours of Research
Next, I started to take some of that advice and try to get into a few publications. I looked at a whole lot of posts on various publications to try to understand the style and the kind of content that was preferred.
Sidebar: I have always been quite successful with work, and for what it’s worth even with writing. And the way I’ve gotten to where I am, is by studying, learning, doing the research and putting in the work.
