Update: I’m Going to Publish Some Programming Articles
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Before I wrote for Medium, I wrote articles for my CS club at school. I’m going to publish those articles here.
After being removed as an author for Cantor’s Paradise for some reason, I was worried that my articles wouldn’t make enough money to justify writing them. I then published my article Vectors and Covectors, which did far better than I expected. In fact, that article outperformed most of the articles that I published in Cantor’s Paradise. I did some digging, and I found a few interesting facts:
- The majority of my views (around 80%) for that article came from within Medium. When I published in Cantor’s Paradise, my articles would get picked up by aggregation things Google and Android’s recommendation systems, leading to some where between 10% to 40% of internal views. While external views are nice and can sometimes get me followers, they don’t lead to a lot of direct payment.
- While people normally add my articles to lists with titles like “Math” or “Modern Physics”, a lot of people kept adding my articles to lists that talked about Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, etc.
On the other hand, my two most recent articles (An Intro to Differential Forms and How to do Well in Your STEM Classes) got far fewer views, reads, fans, and member reading time than my normal articles. I don’t know if it was just the topics themselves or if it was because they weren’t published in a math publication or something else, but they aren’t performing well. While I’ve had articles that performed poorly in the past, they usually had a reason for performing poorly like having a lot of competition (Everyone and their mother has written an article or made a video on the Double Slit Experiment.) or not being something that you would look up on a whim (e.g. Finite Fields). In either case, something about those articles didn’t land. For me to keep writing, I have to have some economic stability, which could either come from having articles that have a wide appeal or getting financial support from a few dedicated supporters or some combination of the two. To get this financial support in either case, I’m going to have to try branching out with my content.
