What Losing 80% of My Medium Income Taught Me
Hello friends,
I want to share something personal today.
My Medium earnings did not fall like a crash. They slipped quietly, almost politely — from one thousand dollars a month to two hundred. The writing stayed the same. The readers stayed the same. Yet the income evaporated.
For a long time, I thought I was doing something wrong.
Then I realised the truth: the platform had changed, not the work.
The signals were small at first.
Stories that once earned a hundred dollars suddenly earned five.
Views remained steady, but payouts dropped.
Curation tightened. Distribution narrowed. RPMs fell across the board.
It is strange how a digital shift can affect you emotionally.
You start refreshing stats too often.
You rewrite paragraphs that were already strong.
You question your voice — not because it became weaker, but because the platform became unstable.
Medium still has value. I will continue writing there.
But this experience taught me something I should have known earlier:
you cannot build your home on someone else’s land.
The work I want preserved — the work I want to own — now lives here and on my main site:
👉 Read the full breakdown on munaeem.com
https://munaeem.com/2025/12/06/medium-earnings-decline/
If you have faced a similar drop, or if you rely on platforms that can change overnight, I hope this reflection helps you feel less alone.
We are all navigating a system that never explains itself.
Thank you for reading,
and thank you for being here.
— Munaeem