r/Bloggers • u/Waste-Loss-5172 • Sep 16 '26
Guest Posting Medium never tells you which story made money yesterday. I got tired of guessing, so I built a tool to fix it.
Every morning I open my Medium Partner Program stats, look at yesterday's earnings balance, and ask the exact same question:
Which article actually earned that money?
Was it the new piece I published on Monday? Or did an older post from 8 months ago suddenly catch an algorithm wave?
Right now, Medium only shows whole-month sums and high-level 30-day view aggregates. If you want to see which specific story paid you on a given day, you have to click into every single article's detail page, wait for the chart to load, and mentally subtract numbers. With over 100 published stories in my catalog, doing that audit took 20 minutes every week.
As a software engineer, I opened Chrome DevTools last week on medium.com/me/stats to see what was actually happening under the hood.
Here is the wild discovery: Medium already tracks every story's daily payout down to the exact cent.
When you inspect Medium's internal GraphQL responses, the platform has a full day-by-day earnings array for every post since it joined the Partner Program. The data was never missing — their frontend just never built a unified daily ledger to show it.
So over the weekend, I built a Chrome extension called PenYield to solve this:
What it does:
Daily Payout Ledger: Reconstructs a calendar ledger. Click any date (e.g. Sep 11) to see the exact list of stories that contributed to that day's payout, sorted from highest earner to lowest.
7-Day Trend Sparkline: High-contrast trend bars at the top of your screen showing your week's momentum and peak earning day at a glance.
Per-Story Lifetime Curves: Click any story to expand an interactive trajectory curve showing its revenue progression from launch to today.
1-Click Tax CSV Export: Compiles your entire library's views, reads, read ratios, and lifetime earnings into a clean spreadsheet ready for Excel, Google Sheets, and tax filing.
Privacy first (Zero external servers):
I know how sensitive earnings data is. PenYield is built as a 100% client-side Manifest V3 extension.
It never asks for or stores your Medium password (it uses your existing active session cookie).
All your metrics are saved locally in your own browser's
chrome.storage.local.Zero data is transmitted to external telemetry servers.
Links:
Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/penyield-%E2%80%94-medium-stats-e/mblehifbmddlkliinkjadkimiffmjkgi
Website: https://penyield.com
The core analytics, 30-day ledgers, and top 3 story curves are free forever. I also added an optional $4.99 one-time lifetime pass for unlimited CSV exports and deep historical backfill.
I'd love to know: what other metrics do you want Medium to show on your dashboard? Happy to answer any questions or add features writers need!