An Eye Opening Revelation About Medium Views
A 100% read rate has shown me something shocking
Since I’ve been writing on Newsbreak, I’ve noticed something profound that is surely affecting our Medium views. The number of reads we get on Newsbreak is directly proportional to the number of impressions recorded— the number of times our stories show up on people’s feeds.
This might seem obvious, but I’ve often wondered if my stories flop because of bad headlines, wrong pictures, etc. I’d assumed that reasonable visibility was applied to all posts — at least when they’re first published.
Of course, it’s true that stories are more likely to flop if you give them a really crap headline with zero curiosity factor. But spending time on Newsbreak has also clearly shown me that this is not always the key factor driving reads. It’s actually more about distribution, visibility — in a word, it’s about impressions!
While a decent headline can make a big a difference to whether your story performs well, it’s also possible that your brilliant story has only shown up on the feeds of two people! And therein lies a problem.
On Newsbreak, I’ve got 100% read rate on some stories. Every single person who saw these stories, clicked through to read them. But those views are single digit figures because Newsbreak has literally only shown the stories to a handful of readers, even though everyone who saw them, read them.
One of my Newsbreak stories has one impression and one view. No, it wasn’t worth putting it there.
Some people might conclude that the platform has blacklisted me! I don’t think that’s the case because some of my other stories are doing relatively well. I’m not sure why some stories don’t get shown to readers, but it’s frustrating. It might simply be that the algorithm is programmed to make a judgement on each story’s likely popularity… and some of them don’t score very highly.
I did ask Newsbreak Support to clarify what had happened on one such story, and they told me it had been labelled as ‘adult content’, which dramatically reduces visibility on the platform. It wasn’t adult content, so they removed that label. Then impressions and views picked up a little, but not a lot.
However, other stories have suffered from very few impressions without sporting ‘adult content’ labels.
On Medium, we don’t get to see how many impressions our stories are given. But clearly, if Medium only shows your story to one person, that story is not going to fly. This could be a big factor in what drives a story to do well — or not. It might also provide an incentive for us to share our stories widely on social media.
It’s certainly illuminating to see this play out on Newsbreak. My stories that get tens of thousands of impressions are the ones that get lots of views and earn relatively well. Newsbreak doesn’t measure reads, but you can assume that most people who click through to view a story read a little bit, at least.
It would be very interesting to know how many impressions Medium gives to our stories, and how that translates into views.
There is a very clear cause and effect on Newsbreak, based on impressions. The stories that get the most impressions get the most views and earn the most money. Essentially, how the stories perform is completely out of our control.
It’s also nice to know that when a story does badly, it’s because Newsbreak isn’t showing it to anyone, not because of a bad headline or something I could have fixed. It’s because of an annoying thing over which I have no control.
I’d love to see how many impressions each story gets on Medium, but can you imagine it? If Medium showed impressions, there would be loads of stories popping up on Medium, with writers moaning about their lack of impressions! As it is, we just get stories moaning about lack of reads and lack of earnings. Hey ho.
Key message: don’t necessarily assume it’s your own fault if stories flop. It might be lack of impressions.
© Susie Kearley 2023. All Rights Reserved.
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