How I Make $5,000 A Month Just By Following People

Actually, $4,950 is how much I made the last month on Medium, thanks to their generous Partnership Program. I will now tell you my story, a story of great and ridiculously simple success at a very young age.

A follower walks into a bar

So recently I was in a pub with my friends, drinking beer. I didn’t drink because I was driving a car.

We were talking about some hobbies we have. So I mentioned writing for Medium and how I want to earn a passive income from that. My friends were all ears and asked a lot of different questions. I didn’t have a partnership program on my private profile (this one) back then but I knew a thing or two about the theory of monetization because I have read a ton of articles and guides on how to make money.

Sometimes I think I could instead write articles. But back to the topic.

I mentioned I didn’t have enough followers to apply. So one of my friends suggested making a virtual account and following myself. That was so obscure and obvious cheat that I laughed.

I explained why it doesn't work, since I would have “dead” followers that I would have to log into to view my own writings to get views.

We chit-chatted a bit and one thing led to another.

“Why don’t you make a virtual society there?”, one friend asked.

Then it struck me. What if I create a group of accounts and give everyone a set of articles and then view those articles with every account?

If I made 101 accounts I follow one another and apply for a partnership with Medium with 100 accounts. Then I would view articles of every account with every account I own.

But was that worth it? I had to calculate

When my friends went to get another round of beers, I took one napkin and started to do the math, Good Will Hunting style.

This is not the same napkin I wrote on. Photo by Nicole Wilcox on Unsplash

I was astonished, to say the least. I assumed $5 per 1000 views, which is more or less what you can expect.

The math is actually very easy. Every follower can view every follower’s every article. If everybody has one article that would be 100 times 99 because you can’t view your own.

To cut the long calculations short, the results are as follows:

As you can see from my brief napkin calculations, the amount of earned money increases significantly.

Just by creating 1000 google accounts, you can earn 5 grand per month easily. Superb!

So I put that idea into practice

Creating accounts was a piece of cake. The most difficult and cumbersome asks were inventing personal details.

After twenty accounts or so I started to put numbers that are following the previous one. I started with 900–000–000 to make it easier.

For addresses I was putting the same address in Poland:

Generic Street, Cardboard Box No 1, Capital City, Poland

I assumed that Google and Medium likewise do know very little about Poland and will believe that we live in either cardboard boxes for western electronics or in sewers.

The first and family were the toughest. I decided to cheese the system again, by mixing Polish and formal royal ways of naming people. The first account would be Andrzej The First, second would be Andrzej The Second…

Can you guess what was the tenth name? Andrzej Kowalski.

Yes, I get bored easily. By the way, Kowalski is the most popular last name in Poland and is directly translated to Smith. It’s awesome, right?

Generating content

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

To generate content I made a short script in Python that imports 1000 most popular words in English and mashes them randomly into 7 to 11 word-long lines.

Then I randomly choose up to 4 words and make them a title for the newly generated poem. The great thing here is that nobody can openly say that it is bad writing because that would mean they don’t get it.

Getting the views

That was the most satisfying thing to do.

In order to automate a few things, I put a link to every article into one big bookmark folder in my Chrome profile. This way I could get the view part for one account at one go.

Just open a new window in Chrome, navigate to the bookmarks tab, and CTRL + left mouse button onto the folder to open all links at once, each in a separate tab. Then repeat for every account.

So I opened the first one.

My computer’s screen froze for a second.

Then it started to get hot, I could hear the ventilators run at light speed in order to extinguish the newly ignited flames.

And suddenly everything went black. Apparently, the voltage induced due to high power consumption from 100 opened Chrome tabs surprisingly easy killed the power in the whole neighbourhood.

Our energy provider had to replace cables and transformers in a few places which took several days.

Luckily, nobody knows it was my fault. Because how could they?