If 3,000,000 People Read This Article, I Can Pay Off My Student Loans

Six months ago, I published one of my first articles on Vocal: “If 6,000,000 People Read This Article, I Can Pay Off My Student Loans.” In it, I laid out the math. Vocal was paying me a little over three tenths of a penny for every read I could get on an article. It stood to reason that if I could get 6,000,000 reads, I would make a little over $20k and be able to pay off my student loans in full, with a little bit on the side to donate elsewhere. In the meat of the article, I explained that attention is money in this economy, and that even if you don’t have money to spend, you have attention, and that’s worth something. I thought I could capitalize on that, and that I could make a shameless plea for attention seem like a purposeful and thoughtful commentary on the monetary worth of attention.

The experiment was, initially, a success, and I was racking up about a thousand reads per day. However, I eventually ran out of new crowds to beg for attention from. I hit my limit when I tried Reddit and immediately got a slurry of profanity-laced comments. (Sidenote: Reddit kind of sucks.) I tried to cultivate the following with a Facebook page to some success, but as my schedule filled up, I could not sustain engagement at its earlier levels, nor could I grow the community in a way that was self-sustaining. Attention shifts, and as such, if you can’t keep a tight grip on the wheel, that community has a huge chance of slipping away from you.

So, here’s the new challenge. If three million people read my articles, I can pay off my student loans. You may be asking, “Wow, Steven, did you reach half your goal already?” No. No, I did not. I’m up to 14.4k reads on my articles total, 0.2% of my initial goal. So what changed? Well, for starters, I signed up for Vocal+, which ups my rate from 0.36 cents per read to 0.6 cents. Additionally, I have been working retail for these past few months, and I have been putting money into my student loans to pay down at least a portion of them while they’re in forbearance. It’s exhausting, and I can’t wait to not be working retail anymore. Every day, though, is a new experience, and whole new slurry of stories to be told about strange and frightening customers. (Sidenote: Retail may be worse than Reddit.) The fact of the matter is, I need significantly fewer reads to reach my goal than I had originally estimated. We can do this!

I have not failed at reaching my goal. Rather, my goal has changed because of what I have done external of it. I will, of course, attempt to revamp my writing, and publish on Vocal more consistently. My college degree is in writing, not retail. If I can perpetuate a community around my work to the point of paying off my student loans, then I’m sure I’ll be able to make a living as a writer. I just need to keep on spewing content, hoping I find that three-million-read idea. Thank you to everyone who has helped me come this far in my goal. We’re only just now beginning.

For more shameless ploys for your attention, you can follow this project’s Facebook page here. To read more from me on Vocal, you can check out the rest of my articles here. If you want to follow me on Twitter and become privy to my sad, pathetic thoughts that in any other context would rocket me to vague fame, you can click here. And, finally, if you want to follow my Instagram while I try and game the system so that people start paying me to not be in America, you can click here.