How much I made on 25,000 Reads on Medium vs Vocal

Vocal is an up-and-coming platform that offers similar services to Medium and has been garnering a lot of buzz recently. They offer a flat rate payment based on reads, bonuses for story publishing goals, and you can still get paid without paying $5 a month. Unfortunately, you can't self-publish, and nothing under 600 words gets approved. So, there's definitely some work to be done, but the big question is, which pays better?

I just recently hit the 25,000 reads mark on Medium and have since been looking into Vocal, as you own the rights to your own work, and they offer a free, flat rate to publish on their platform. So, you can essentially republish the same, or similar work and get better pay, from my understanding. You don't have to pay $5 a month, and it doesn't matter if the views are internal or not. 

So, how do they stack up?

Vocal offers a flat rate of $3.80 per 1000 reads, meaning, 25,000 reads amounts to $95. I'm told they also offer bonuses based on stories published, so you can get $5 for your first 5 stories published, 10$ at 10, and so on. They also have other bonuses along the way to keep you motivated. 

For Medium, I started writing at the end of February, with decent success. Those numbers are: 

and another 3$ or so on 4.3k reads for this month. Oddly enough, this is the second-highest month since I started writing for reads, and I will probably have my lowest full month pay since I started writing, by ALOT. Anyway, this all evens out to $105 on those 25k reads. That being said, that's on 9 months of writing, so it technically events out to $60.

There's also a number of other factors that come into play here. For example, Vocal offers bonuses along the way, but Medium has greater writers freedom and discoverability. It's also important to note that Medium already has its writing powerhouses that seemingly take over the platform, where if Vocal does well, investing in it early has the potential to help you take that spot on this platform.

Which is Better?

This definitely depends on what you're looking for, but to my knowledge, there's no reason you can't simply use both. If you have a ton of outside, non-member reads on Medium, then it might actually be best to look at Vocal, as they don't have to be member reads, and thus you can earn much more if you already have a strong following. However, Medium might be better starting out if you don't have any of those and need help getting discovered, as Medium is objectively much larger, and more features and so on. While new members tend to make less with their earnings, it's a bit easier to get followers and discovered.

It can't hurt to try both and see which works best for you. If one happens to work better for you, then simply divert more time to one or the other, but as a beginning writer, getting as much exposure as possible tends to be the best approach, because building that base is extremely important.

I will say that Vocal is probably a bit more 'new user' pay friendly though, as giving the bonuses can give you the courage you need to keep going, even if you're not hitting new records on views, reads, and earnings through traditional means, the extra boost of cash can be that nice bank account confidence you need to keep going until you actually start to make it big time in the writing world!