#1 Top Writers
Check out their statistics and learn from the best.
What does it take to reach the ✨number 1 spot✨ on the Top Writer list for a popular Medium tag?
Being new to Medium, I was interested in doing a little research.
- How often do these Top Writers publish?
- Which publications do they write for?
- What were their most popular articles?
Visualising data is my idea of fun! After selecting ten of these Top Writers and looking through their profile pages, I used D3.js to generate the colourful charts below.
The selected writers are arranged by number of followers. Clicking a name will scroll you to down to their chart and statistics.
- Tim Denning
- Umair Haque
- Ayodeji Awosika
- Sean Kernan
- Jessica Wildfire
- Karen Nimmo
- Ella Alderson
- Kamna Kirti
- Entreprogrammer
- Neeramitra Reddy
1. Tim Denning
- #1 Top Writer for Startup, Creativity, Productivity, Social Media, Writing, Innovation, Entrepeneurship
- Top Writer for Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Psychology, Technology, Inspiration, Life, Business, Culture, Relationships
- 193,000+ followers
- ~40 articles per month
Each bubble in the chart represents an article. Yes there’s a lot of bubbles in Tim’s chart. He has written over 320 articles already this year — that’s more than one per day!
The vertical axis represents the number of “claps” an article has received. Although claps do not directly determine earnings, they do give an indication of article popularity.
The colour of the bubble shows the publication source. We can see that Tim had some wildly successful articles in The Ascent earlier in the year, and recently has written more in Curious and a range of other publications.
You don’t become a Top Writer in 16 categories by accident or sheer luck. Tim clearly knows what it takes to succeed on Medium. If you are interested in learning from his experience, check out his profile.
2. Umair Haque
- #1 Top Writer for Life, Politics, Culture, Leadership
- 167,000+ followers
- Editor of Eudaimonia and Co (37,000+ followers)
- ~30 articles per month
The plot is not very colourful, because all of Umair’s 2021 articles have been in his own publication Eudaimonia and Co. But his articles are certainly popular with his readers — consistently receiving thousands of claps.
The size of the bubble reflects the “read time” — most of Umair’s articles range between 5 and 10 minutes. Here is a link to Umair’s profile.
3. Ayodeji Awosika
- #1 Top Writer for Psychology
- Top Writer for Inspiration, Productivity, Life Lessons, Advice, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Education, Creativity, Writing, Startup
- 84,000+ followers
- ~22 articles per month
Ayodeji writes across a broad range of topics and publications. It’s interesting that some of his most popular articles have been self-published. He does have 84,000 followers though, which is more than most publications!
You can look through his backlog of articles to read his advice on becoming a successful writer. He also offers a free Medium Writers course, available at his profile page.
4. Sean Kernan
- #1 Top Writer for Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Humor
- Top writer in Life, Business, Satire, Entrepreneurship, History, Writing
- 58,000+ followers
- ~20 articles per month
Sean has had the most success with the publication Mind Cafe (which has over 128,000 followers). He also gets the prize for the most clapped article on this list, with an astounding 65,000 claps!
It’s worth noting that success is a relative concept. 1000 claps would be “off the charts” for me, but probably underwhelming for Sean Kernan. But what causes one of his articles to go completely viral and get 50,000 claps? This is not so easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
My best articles are usually the result of ideas that seemingly fell out of the sky. I can’t replicate how it happened. — Sean Kernan (source)
5. Jessica Wildfire
- #1 Top Writer in Health
- Top writer in Politics, Creativity, Government, Life, Culture
- 80,000+ followers
- ~20 articles per month
What’s interesting to me about the chart above is that in the last few months, Jessica has moved towards self-publishing more of her articles. Seems to be working for her (but again, she does have a following of 80,000 people!)
Here is a link to Jessica’s profile page.
6. Karen Nimmo
- #1 Top writer in Inspiration
- Top writer in Psychology, Self Improvement, Love, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Relationships, Life
- 26,000+ followers
- Editor of On the Couch (11,000+ followers)
- ~13 articles per month
A professional clinical psychologist, Karen is not as prolific or widely distributed as the “pro-bloggers” above. But she has found her niche and her articles are clearly inspirational to her readers.
Besides editing the psychology publication On The Couch, Karen also has an eBook with the blunt and humorous title Busy As F*ck.
7. Ella Alderson
- #1 Top Writer in Education, Science
- Top Writer in Technology
- 25,000+ followers
- Editor of Predict (22,000 followers)
- ~4 articles per month
An astrophysics student who aims to “marry poetry and science”, Ella created and edits the science publication Predict. It’s interesting that, similar to Umair and Karen above, Ella has more personal followers than the publication she started.
The fact that Ella has reached number one in the popular tags of Education and Science shows that you do not necessarily need to publish every day. But you do need to write high quality articles in topics that you are passionate about! Perhaps it also helps to have a profile photo that is “out of this world”. 😉
8. Kamna Kirti
- #1 Top writer in Art
- Top writer in Culture, History
- 4900+ followers
- ~10 articles per month
Kamna has a passion for art, publishing most of her articles in The Collector (1700 followers). But she has also written on other topics, her most popular recent article being about why she left USA for Canada. You can find it on her profile page, as well as a link to her Youtube channel on art and symbolism.
9. Entreprogrammer
- #1 Top writer in Technology
- 4000+ followers
- ~4 articles per month
These results are an inspiration for newcomers to Medium. Entreprogrammer only joined Medium in May 2021, and after 20+ articles he has already reached the #1 spot for the popular technology tag! Impressive.
Check out his profile if you want to know more.
10. Neeramitra Reddy
- #2 Top Writer for Advice (#1 was The Good Men Project, but I wanted to keep this list to individuals)
- Top Writer for Inspiration, Health, Self Improvement, Productivity
- 3000+ followers
- ~15 articles per month
Neeramitra writes on various topics around the theme of health and self-improvement. Recently he has had the most success writing for In Fitness and Health (18,000+ followers) and Publishous (39,000+ followers).
Here is a link to his profile.
Quiz time!
OK I’m putting my teacher hat on now… it’s quiz time!
The word clouds below are generated from the titles and subtitles from 5 of the Top Writers above. Can you match up the writer to their word cloud?
Top Writer 1
Top Writer 2
Top Writer 3
Top Writer 4
Top Writer 5
I’ll leave the answers in a response to this post below. Thanks to Jason Davies for his free Word Cloud Generator.
Thanks for reading and good luck on your journey to becoming a Top Writer!🦸🏼🧜🏼♂️🧝🏽♀️
You may also be interested in my previous article on Medium Topics.
Disclaimer: This list is not meant to be a definitive “Top 10”. There are many #1 Top Writers in other tags, some of whom have more followers and claps than those shown here.
