It’s hard to say. Two articles that I had in the Startup did fairly well because they seemed to circulate for a while. But the same thing has happened in DDI with certain articles as well. The money you earn of course could be one penny or five dollars from any given reader regardless where it appears, and whether or not in a publication. Basically if the article gets curated, that gives you a better chance but no guarantee, and if it also gets into a publication, that can bump it a little more. But on the whole I’ve had articles that we’re not curated nor in any publications that still pretty much did comparably. The problem with the Startup is that it’s such a mishmash of topics now, and it’s so big that it seems like your article can get lost in there quite quickly anyway. I saw an article that pulled data for the top earning articles, and I think a high % of them were in the Gen and OneZero pubs. I submitted to Gen once, but I write things that are timely and I want them to be read soon, so I basically won’t wait more than a day to see if it’s in a publication or not. To me it seems like once you get curated for the first time, your articles either get curated within about five hours or they don’t get curated at all. And if your articles are good, the publications may ask you for them. Both of my articles in the startup were because they requested them from me. The one or two that I submitted to the startup myself didn’t get accepted/I never heard back.

If I were starting over, I would aim for trying to write really good articles first, and occasionally submit to pubs that have a decent readership, you know 10K or more. But otherwise the amount you earn is so random that you can’t rely on the numbers. Right now I have two articles that each have 3000 clicks and a similar read time percentage, and yet one of them earned under two dollars and the other one has earned $65, the higher earning article was curated and a much higher percentage of the readers are media members. Trying to get medium members to read it is really the goal because it’s the only thing that earns you money, but you have very little control over that. That’s why there’s so many articles about writing on Medium, because other riders are trying to learn from them. But since I write about economics, it’s not my primary audience so I have to count on getting lucky.