Why Medium Has More Earning Potential Than Simily

Except for very specific types of articles, under the current payout plan

Image credit TeeFarm — Pixabay

“Writers — Don’t Miss Out on a Chance to Earn on this Exciting New Platform,” headlines in my Medium Daily Digest have read over the past couple of weeks.

The “exciting new platform” is Simily. It’s an online content creation platform with an editor similar to that of Medium. Although it’s geared toward fiction and creative writing, you can publish on any topic you want there (except erotica, which violates an agreement with Simily’s payment processor).

When you’re finished an article on Simily, you click a button to submit it for review. However, it’s my experience that articles on that platform publish almost instantly. If there’s any “review” of stories at all before publishing, it’s done by no more than an algorithm or bot.

The reason Simily is being talked about so much is that its current payout structure is so different from Medium’s.

The difference between Medium’s payout structure and Simily’s payout structure

Medium’s payout structure is a little convoluted. A million people can view your article through good SEO, links on other websites, or social media, but if those people are not paid Medium members (paying $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited reading), you don’t make a cent from them.

Even if a million paid Medium members view your article, you’re not guaranteed to make money. Read time, rather than views, is what matters. The more read time your articles accumulate, the bigger your slice of the Medium subscription fee pie.

The reason writers are drawn to Simily, on the other hand, is that its payout structure is pure simplicity: You get 2 cents per view. It doesn’t matter whether the reader is a Simily member or not.

If your article gets 1000 views, you make $20.

If your article gets 10,000 views, you make $200.

And if you write the hypothetical million-view article, you make $20,000. The same article could make you $8.39 on Medium if almost all the readers are not paid members.