WRITING | MEDIUM

A List of My Most Read Stories in 2023

My biggest earners and the stories behind the curtain

Between three continents, jumping out of planes for a living, traveling in a car through the African bush for weeks on end and hiking through the Alps in the northern and southern hemispheres, I have certainly come around in 2023.

While my year didn’t end on a positive note, I want to focus on the more positive things in this post, talking not so much about what I’ve done but what this platform allowed me to become.

It’s been my fourth year on Medium and by far the one I achieved the most if you’d only look at the bank account. I might have gained for followers in 2022 but certainly grew my tight readership in 2023.

While many writers have left the platform, I decided to stick it out. I never complained, just did what I enjoyed and that was writing about my travels and sharing personal narratives about my life around the globe.

Medium possibly made the most amount of changes within one year upsetting many publishers but I don’t understand why. If you don’t like it, nobody forces you to stay. The only constant in life is change and this platform is doing what it has to do to stay atop and alive.

It constantly evolves.

In an effort to remain ad-free and still pay its writers, Medium has shifted from rewarding mostly instructional and self-help articles to focusing on the core of writing, in my eyes, the personal narrative.

This shift was certainly paying off for me as it turned out to be my best year yet. My three all-time top earners have been published this year and none of them were stories about my success on Medium or negative essays, the kind news love to spread.

If you are looking at my all-time top earners, eight of them have been published in 2023 and all of those have been boosted. Another feature Medium introduced this year, taking away the curation status which had zero impact on my stories and replacing it with a powerful boost program.

And while I am at it looking at the new stats page, I clicked on least viewed and was surprised to see seven out of the ten least viewed stories were also published in 2023. Maybe a sign I did publish a lot and did not always care if the posts were of quality or not. Some things I decided just had to go out but didn’t get looked at by more than a handful of readers.

The most viewed story comes in second overall after “The Magic of a Sunset” with 28K views. “Where a Dam Wall Created the Largest Man-Made Lake in the World” was published in Feb 2023 and reached almost 17K views and 9K reads but only earned me 10 bucks though. In total. 9,000 reads make this my most-read story ever as it has double as many reads as the sunset essay.

Yes, views and reads are not the same. As soon as you click on an article and it opens up, it is qualified a view. But only once you begin to read the essay and spend more than 30 seconds on the page, a view will convert into a read. Reads are what writers want and that is why it is crucial to catch the attention of anyone visiting our page within the first lines.

Done with the talking, let’s get to the point and look at every month’s best sellers. Or best earners.

January

Since Medium introduced the new boost program in February 2023, my biggest earner in January is the only essay on this list that was not boosted. All others received a decent boost in views, reads and therefore earnings as well.

Surprisingly, this month's top leader is an introduction to the writing challenge at Globetrotters. Asking writers for their travel wish lists while sharing my own ideas and plans for the year ahead was what made it to the top.

I wrote about the big road trip I was going to embark on. A crossing of Africa from West to East. It ended up taking us two months and was not only the longest road trip I’ve ever taken but also by far the roughest one.

“So here we go. Being currently based in Namibia, we will be starting at the Atlantic Ocean driving east while crossing Zambia and Zimbabwe until we reach the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. We have about 2 months for the trip and little else planned yet.”

February

Talking about that trip. Here is the first boosted story. While we ended up taking a totally different route than initially planned, we got stuck in Zimbabwe, a country we only wanted to pass through. We loved it so much, we ended up staying an entire month.

Our last stop led us to the Eastern Highlands, a mountain range at the border between Zim and Mozambique. And yes, that was my favorite camping spot. By far.

“Where the mountain stops and drops hundreds of meters into the valley below was where we parked the car. We didn’t set up the gazebo as it would have taken off to another planet but sat on our chairs overlooking the world from the edge of a mountain.”

March

While Mozambique was our destination country reaching the Indian Ocean and going on lots of dives we dreamt of, a cyclone approaching the coast cut our stay short and forced us to take an escape route, we did not plan on taking.

And this is how we ended up in a country we didn’t want to visit.

“Nobody spoke to us. Not even a “Hello, how are you”. They took our passports. Stamped us out of Mozambique without questions asked. And on the other side the same. I got a 90-day entry into South Africa. The officer never asked what, how and why.”

April

By April we had left the African continent and settled in Germany. For a few months at least. While fighting the cold and gloomy weather, I scrolled through thousands of pictures on my hard drive and wrote an article about a visit to Norway years ago.

It was a response to ‘The A to Z of my favorite travel destinations’, one I still haven’t finished yet. And while my memories had faded mostly, I still managed to put together an interesting article as it seems because I wouldn’t say the title was a killer.

But the essay got boosted and received a wider audience than expected.

“Together with a friend, I decided to head north and experience New Year’s in the capital of Norway. Visiting Oslo was a first for both of us and we were excited about getting some real cold and snowy winter experience.”

May

Staying on the same topic of my favorite travel destinations, I wrote up another piece to the letter of ‘P’. Taking my readers down South to Croatia into the mountains where waterfalls are shooting out of the forest, I would say I put more effort into a good title in this time.

“The lakes below were shining in such a turquoise blue color, I didn’t know that appearance was real. It seemed too perfect, too bright to be found in nature.”

June

In June I first traveled for a week to Czechia and then did a multiple-day hiking trip on the border between Germany and Austria which means I spent more time offline than online and didn’t write much.

Therefore it ended up being my weakest month of the year and the top earner stayed the same from May. The Croatian essay continued earning through June.

July

While I should have been busy jumping out of planes most of July, the weather was incredibly miserable for a German summer and I used the accumulated time on the ground to write up a lot more stories.

This month’s best earner was a writing prompt response to SNAPSHOTS’ challenge. Talking about how I fell in love with Namibia, a country with a special place in my heart resonated the most with my readers. I guess one could experience my feelings through the words typed.

“The moment when rain turns the driest parts of this country into a meadow will be the memories I take with me into eternity. Such beauty I haven’t seen, felt or heard of before.”

August

In August my earnings spiked again and this article alone made more than I earned in July in total. It was a very personal essay I began writing at the beginning of the year and didn’t feel strong enough to get it out until August.

I re-wrote a lot of sections and spent lots of time revising and proofreading it. The personal background of it must have been what resonated most with my readers as many could relate to my feelings even if it had been in a different field.

This story was published in Curious, one of Medium’s big publications and I think my only submission to them in 2023.

“But I never knew the actual challenge wasn’t going to be a physical one. I didn’t know how strong I had to be mentally to withstand the daily fight of having to prove myself.”

September

In September I reached another milestone I didn’t know existed out here. When I received the email about my article being selected by Medium Staff, I didn’t think much of it. Until I read the newsletter and my story wasn’t just a mention in it, but Medium selected my photo as their title image of the post.

To say I was stoked is a huge understatement.

What I created out of a simple walk in the rain is still a little unreal to me but proves that quality photographs with personal narratives do have a home on this platform.

“As I’m listening to the constant dropping of rain onto the trailer roof, I think of all the objects I could capture out there. In the rain. Beginning with raindrops. Those uniquely shaped circles get stretched when sucked by gravity onto Earth.”

October

While I would have thought the above story would remain atop for another month or two, it continued earning a fair bit but another boosted story pushed it off the podium.

Writing a response to a ‘picture that tells a thousand word-story’ brought me to creating this essay. It’s not just a story of how I climbed that mountain. It captures a lot more. The time back then and the feelings I had. I was happy. I was in a very happy place in my life.

“It was a different mountain. A different moment. It wasn’t even the highest mountain I’ve ever climbed. But it was the surroundings that gave me the feeling of overlooking the earth. Not only the physical surroundings of standing at the top of a mountain but also mentally. I was at a place and time in my life where I don’t know if I’ll ever reach that level of happiness again.”

November

Reaching the end of the year, the boosted stories did not just receive a lot more reads but also exploded in earnings. Focusing on publishing high-quality travel essays filled with personal narratives is what brought me in several boosted stories in November and December.

Arriving in a new country down under, I was filled with awe and excitement every single day. Containing that feeling and bringing to paper what I saw wasn’t easy but this piece must have hit the point.

“All of a sudden this wall next to us ended and the trail just stopped. Well, it didn’t stop, it dropped off a hundred-meter steep cliff filled with loose rock. But behind it was this beautiful glacier-fed lake with icebergs inside tumbling around.”

December

The last month of the year became my best month ever on this platform. Not even the months where I was handed out the full engagement bonus in 2021 earned me more.

The top six stories, which were all boosted, collected about 70% of the total earnings that month and I truly enjoyed watching them climb. While I thought I knew which story was taking the podium position in the end, this writing prompt response to Globetrotters’ monthly challenge received a boost and overtook all of them.

“It’s something I haven’t experienced traveling or living on any of the other continents and it is something that has gotten deep into my soul. It’s more than a holiday happiness. I wouldn’t call it a religion but it carries more than a feeling. In some sense, it is a belief.”

So, this was my list of the most-read articles of 2023. A mixture of personal essays and writing prompt responses represent the interest my readers have in my writing.

With this piece, I want to thank all of you for being here, always reading and commenting on my work and encouraging me with your kind words.

Thank you.

I wish you all a wonderful 2024.

This was last year’s summary for anyone interested:

And I’m tagging here Penny Grubb who wrote a similar but shorter version of her most-read stories: “What Can You Learn From Your Most-Read Stories?”

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