Views reduced from 11K to 3K when I pay-walled my stories on Medium.

Is that good or bad?

S. S. Tharan
2 min readFeb 19, 2024

I joined the Medium Partner Program on the 4th of Feb 2024 (Just a month ago).

Before that, all my articles are kept free for everyone to read. After the 7th of Feb, 2024 I paywall-ed most of my old articles.

Then this happened. A sudden dip in views.

During January I have around 300 views per day. Now after pay-walling my articles, the number moved down to 70 to 80 per day on average.

The below screenshot shows the Jan stats.

January 2024 Stats (The Y axis is up to 1K)

The next one shows the February’s stats.

February 2024 (until Feb 18) Stats (The Y axis is 210)

The change in the frequency of publishing may have affected this graph a little.

But the main factor is, that I lost a major share of views from free-readers.

I wanted to share my writing with everyone. At the same time, I want to earn through it too.

To balance both, I planned to keep my most helpful articles for Medium writers FREE.

I haven’t thought about this before. Most of my followers are free users of Medium. Almost everyone from my home country is also a free user.

Right now I am in search of finding the perfect balance between reaching the larger audience base and earning a decent amount out of my writing.

Any suggestions?

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S. S. Tharan

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