My 5 Most-Read Stories in 2022 on Medium

How much did they make?

Sarah Willey
4 min readDec 21, 2022

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Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Story #1: Who is Linda Skeens?

3.5K reads, $9.05 earned

This was the first of my posts to ever get a wild number of views. It was a story I wrote on a whim, after seeing a viral post on Facebook about a mysterious woman virtually sweeping a county fair. I was intrigued, and the first thing I did was Google her. I literally typed, “Who is Linda Skeens?” into the search bar trying to find this woman. I didn’t get my answer. So I wrote about how I felt about it, and I used my exact search question as my article title. When everyone else reading the viral post went to their favorite search engine with the same question, they found my article.

While this was also the best-performing article on this list in terms of money, it’s still a pretty small amount of cash at the end of the day. Likely many of the people who read it were not Medium members. However, it also contributed to growing my audience, and content creation is a long game. Plus, it was one of the most fun pieces I’ve written in a while.

Story #2: A Side Hustle Date Night

1.2K reads, $1.30 earned

I thought sharing the story of side hustling as part of a date night would be an interesting way to reach audiences with various interests, and it was a story I was happy to share with the world. I published it through the Side Hustle Club publication, which means I had a chance of having traffic reach me through the publication as well as through my own outreach. It didn’t make a ton of money, but it was also a fun story to write and share, and hopefully it did some good in the world by inspiring others!

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Sarah Willey

Consultant, writer, business scholar. Nonprofit nerd; passionate about relationship-building and community. sarah@sarahwilleyllc.com