RETRACTED — How to Monetize Your Comments on Medium and Why it Barely Pays

I made a mistake: turns out Medium does not allow monetization of responses.

KR Franklin
5 min readNov 17, 2020

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Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

CORRECTION & RETRACTION

Many thanks go out to Nancy Lovering for correcting my mistake. She discovered the “Make this response a story” feature does not monetize Medium comments.

In my original story, I claimed you could monetize your comments by selecting that hidden feature before submitting. Upon further research, I confirmed Nancy’s findings and realized my error.

Source: Medium’s Help Center

Screenshot captured by author | Medium

The “Make this response a story” feature simply allows you to write a more extended response/comment to a story. It does not qualify your comment for Medium’s Partner Program and thus earnings.

In my haste to share an insight, I forgot to cross my T’s and dot my I’s. For that, I apologize for the oversight and any confusion.

For more information, check out the Medium Help Center:

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214578008-Write-a-response

Original Story

Have you noticed when you comment on Medium, it registers as a story? It comes fully-equipped with its own statistics: Reads, Views, Fans, and Member Reading Time.

Imagine that — your comments acquiring more Fans than your stories!

Here’s the big question: Can you make money on your responses, especially since they’re so easy to put together?

The answer is yes — you can absolutely earn money on your comments, and I will show you how to enable it on the Medium Partner Program. Afterward, I will try to close the Pandora’s box by describing the drawbacks.

Statistics

According to my statistics, I’ve published 108 stories since joining Medium in July 2020. Can you guess how many of the 108 are actual stories and not just comments?

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KR Franklin

Just a writer trying to make a dent in the universe, one typo at a time.