I have a love-and-hate relationship with NewsBreak. It’s not my first rodeo.

Two years ago, I joined the mainly local news-based writing platform to see what the fuzz was all about. I heard stories about people making good money there, I even wrote about Matt who made a staggering 17K in one month from NewsBreak reads alone.

I joined, began writing, and saw high impressions and views, but the earnings were unsatisfying. I also wasn’t hugely interested in writing news stories.

So, I quit.

Another run

Lately, I am starting to embark on my full-time creator career after 10+ years working a 9-to-5 in the tech industry as a computational linguist. This gives me more time to try things again.

NewsBreak was one of those things on my to-do list.

So, I re-joined a week ago. And the results are interesting.

In most of my time on Medium, Substack, or any other writing platform (including 15+ years of personal blogging at this point), I haven’t seen a platform with these view counts within the first week.

This is a week in numbers:

On Medium, we’ll be lucky to hit 16K views in a month. On NewsBreak, this is a day for a newbie writer who started from 0.

Yes, without any following, previous story catalog, or shortcuts.

Money talk

84K views in a week. What about money?

I haven’t made a cent!

As I said, I started from scratch with 0 followers and 0 stories. To apply for NewsBreak monetization, however, I need 100 registered followers and 10 published stories.

Then, NewsBreak will review your application and approve or reject it.

The good news: Within this first week and 84K views, I gained 165+ registered followers, 300 followers overall, and managed the 10 published stories with ease.

The pros

In fact, I managed to publish more than 40 stories. That’s one of the benefits of NewsBreak and its news-searching audience. Short reads are a good fit. 250 words is the minimum, and you can do a lot in 250 words.

I’ve mostly written short content.

a word on the followers vs. registered followers. That’s an important distinction for monetization. You need people who are signed up with NewsBreak to hit the entry requirements.

In my short-term experiment, this target wasn’t difficult to reach.

The ugly

To the bad part. I still don’t truly enjoy writing news content. But I wanted to give it a go anyway.

Far worse, though, is the NewsBreak comment section.

I mean, oh boy…

Some hate Medium’s comment section because it’s filled with spam. I haven’t had much of that issue.

But NewsBreak is a different animal entirely. It makes me think whether NewsBreak does (at all) or even cares about filtering responses. Because the comments are full of racism, sexism, hate speech, insults, and more such things. Not all and not on every post, but it’s worrisome.

NewsBreak desperately needs a comment moderation system, in my eyes.

Or do it like I do, and simply ignore the comment section.

The bottom line

NewsBreak is interesting, to say the least. The rapid growth opportunities are a unique factor.

It won’t lead to huge earnings right away, I am pretty sure. It remains to be seen if my monetization application will go through or not. And if so, how this view count will relate to actual earnings later on.

In the past, I wasn’t impressed with the paycheck, then again, I never consistently wrote there and didn’t reach an exciting stage of views and engagement.

This time around, with a little spare time on my hands, I might try to fully understand and work the platform.