Chris, when I started writing on Medium, I was living in South Africa. Despite the fact that all the people I invited to join Medium were getting traffic, I didn't. I was puzzled because I moved some of my best pieces to Medium - copycats from other sites and they had been ranking number one on Google for a decade.

No readership.

I submitted to various publications, but did not received much of a readership.

Then I relocated to Germany, and I was there for two weeks in April 2021, and I received the first of the $500 prizes for being one of the top 1000 writers on Medium. I had a following of 600 at that point. None of my articles up to that point had more than 25 or 30 reads.

Then there was an uproar on Medium because nobody had been told about it and nobody knew what they were looking for. I'm convinced that Medium had chosen the good writers at that point, and after that, just chose the people who earned the most. Nevertheless for the next four months, I was selected as one of the top 1000 readers on Medium. My top article earned mr $2400 with 28,000 reads, and then a few months later, I was shadow banned (nothing that I wrote was not heavily checked, and it was purely politics). Until April this year, I was shadow banned, and then it was lifted, my income dropping to $60 per month at times.

Fortunately, one of my readers had donated $50,000 to me, and I was able to survive as a writer.

Since April, I have started earning again, generally just below four figures or a few hundred above.

I don't submit to other publications. I don't advertise. I rely on the algorithm to present my work to whom they think would be interested. I write what I like on a wide variety of topics - whatever comes to me in the moment.

I have never tired to improve or develop my writing - whatever that means, but if you read my 'about' section, you will see that my writing is highly ranked. I don't need a portfolio - I don't like working for other people. I would rather be poor. I do learn from research, but that is not my purpose in reading it. Does it give me satisfaction? I suppose so, but I don't write for that reason. I write to get things off my chest and I write to earn money.

We are different. People write for different reasons.