I thought it was a glitch.

I’ve started content writing a couple of months, and I love it. I write on my website’s blog, and I import to Medium. It’s the most straightforward strategy for any writer to begin writing.

One of my articles, a very controversial problem with a big tech platform called Upwork, has been trending on Medium. I chose not to monetize from it as it seems rather unethical, as my end goal with this article is to explain a problem to future fellow freelancers.

A couple of weeks before, after monetizing on Medium, I thought of monetizing my blog using AdSense, because why not, in the long run, the more content I write, the more people view it. So I did.

I had no idea that one of the readers of my Medium blog would submit it on HackerNews, using my original post from my original website. So then, I check usually Google analytics. They always pop in front of me how many users are seeing your website right now.

The Spike

Usually, it’s around 1-5 users. That moment, I saw 500. Then I thought that a bot is about to destroy or hack my website somehow. I immediately googled the article and started looking around my analytics. Then, I found a website called Hacker News (I didn’t know what the website was.) with my article in the top 10 with over 150 comments.

I was very thankful to the person who submitted it. Because at the end of the day, I wanted to inform as many people as possible about that situation. Apparently, Ycombinator, one of the biggest VCs that exist runs HN (Hacker News). They have over 5.5 million views per day.

Even though I am very grateful for every comment posted, I took this as a learning experience when it comes to blogging and Adsense. I’m highly interested in blogging via Medium and my personal blog. That’s why this was the perfect learning opportunity.

I kept monitoring the website, fixing a few bugs here and there. Then looked at the final analytics two days after.

Overall, there were a little more than 20,000 views in a single day. Google is actually suspicious and is limiting ads because of this at the moment. (Which is normal, they’ll study and understand how this happened.)

Then I wanted to further understand how could this affect my Adsense revenue compared to Medium. I was always interested in this element because, at Medium, it is commonly advised to write your own blog. So I was thinking, “Okay, I had around 20k visits on my blog, how much money did I make?”

So I checked AdSense.

In three days, the total was around CHF79.90 – USD87.26

That’s not too bad. Relatively speaking on Medium, this month, I’m looking at 35-40k views with earnings of around $600+. Of course, It’s not the same as those are total monthly views, while this is a result of one day. Thereby, it’s not too bad after all.

In the end, I agree with the majority of writers on Medium. A writer here should also have her/his own blog in order to achieve the full potential. In my case, if I didn’t have the blog, I would’ve never been referenced. But also, I would’ve never been referenced, if the reader didn’t find me on Medium, then refer me.

Hence, they both work ways.

Whether through Adsense or Medium, the objective should not be different, as long as it delivers value to the reader.

---

I’m Al, a business consultant in Zurich, Switzerland. I believe in the power of delivering value to you, the reader. I’m focusing my content to be more and more on Medium, and Linkedin. Hence, follow me on both channels to keep in touch and connect.