How much can you earn from medium, realistically?

I will tell you, but first, let me bore you with how I got to the medium.

I knew nothing about medium.com until March 25, 2021. The week before, in a perplexing move, the US-backed government attacked a Hazara anti-Taliban commander in Behsood, Maidan Wardak province, Afghanistan, killing more than 30 civilians. This was perplexing because both commander Alipoor and the government of Ashraf Ghani were fighting the Taliban. The old saying, "Your enemy’s enemy is your friend,” did not hold. The government propaganda machine and daily racism against the Hazaras stormed social media and news outlets. I wanted to write a piece to counter it, but getting published in outlets was time-consuming, and the editors would have edited a lot, obscuring my argument. I had written to many outlets before, who almost edited me out of the piece entirely. I googled what the best blogging site was, the Medium came up. Then I wrote my article (for the article, click here) sharing it on social media, which attracted over 500 readers. Then, after the US-backed government fell into the hands of the Taliban in August 2021, I wrote a couple more articles (check hyperlinks here and here).

After becoming a refugee and desperate to make a side hustle and support a home-based class after the Taliban banned female education in Afghanistan, I found that I could make a few dollars on medium. With my “tenuous grasp of the English language,” I borrowed this phrase from Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. I started using the medium more extensively.

Now that I have bored you enough, I will explain how much I have earned since then; that may be why you started reading this post in the first place.

In December 2022, I earned $0.42 before the tax. Yes, there will be a tax of as much as 30%. Finally, the amount deposited into my Stripe Account was $0.24, which was not transferred to my bank account as it was less than the minimum transferable amount. Last January, I earned $14.07 before tax. And in the first five days of this month, I made $4.38 before tax (See the screenshot below). The highest-earning post earned me $2.81 (click here to read it), forty cents less than a construction worker’s daily wage in Kabul but slightly more than my distant cousin’s daily earnings helping a shopkeeper in a suburb of the capital city.