Analyzing My 6 Most Popular Stories
What made them go viral?
Call me slow, but after over 2 years on this platform, I just realized that you could click on the stats page column headings to sort your articles. So, I immediately sorted them to find out which of my 861 stories were the most popular.
Then, of course, I wanted to see if the popularity could be correlated with the amount of money those stories had earned. Was there anything the stories had in common that might help explain their popularity?
Here is a list of my six most popular stories, as of yesterday.
29K views, 21K reads
The clear frontrunner, with over 21,000 reads, is “Why’s My Pillow Moving?” The image is an adorable yet perplexed cat, who appears to be getting attacked by a pillow. It’s a short-form story, in a publication dedicated to short-form stories. And it was shared by multiple cat lovers on social media, who found the story amusing.
It earned me a whopping $1.70 over its lifetime. Even though there were tens of thousands of reads, less than 200 came from Medium members. And the people who follow a social media post to read a one-minute humorous story are not motivated to join Medium to read more.
6.9K views, 3.2K reads
Next up in popularity is an article that addresses a particular obscure error message in Windows. The image is the text of the error message. Virtually all of the readers were external, and came from people who were searching for the answer to fix that error message.
That story earned $3.05 over its lifetime. There were only 31 Medium members, who combined to read it for a total of a little over 11 minutes. However, it attracted a number of people who decided that articles on Medium could solve their problems, and they needed to read more than the monthly free allotment. Could more articles like this, targeted to address a specific obscure problem, also do well?
4.3K views, 2K reads
The answer to that question appears to be, “Yes.” Since my third-most popular story is also a how-to article about an obscure problem. An evergreen article, it continues to attract between 2 and 26 readers every day. But it earned only $1.12.
The image is of a group of young people pointing at a screen. It probably doesn’t hurt the story’s performance, but it certainly doesn’t help. The total amount of read time is slightly less than 13 minutes, from which I can deduce that fewer readers of this article became Medium members than readers of the previous article. Why? I have no idea.
3.4K views, 1K reads
My article about the best locations to be a digital nomad just happened to come out at the exact same time as Croatia was sponsoring an initiative to encourage digital nomads to move there. Many of the people exploring that option were Medium members. As a result, nearly 2,000 members spent over 27 hours reading this article. Although it’s my 4th most popular story, it’s by far the most well-paying. To date, it’s earned $107.41.
The timing was a fluke that can’t be replicated. The image was a vivid shot of a laptop at a tropical beach that was both eye-catching and appealing. That certainly helped the traffic for the article. The best part about this topic was that I was answering a question from one of my readers. What one reader wonders about, many others wonder about, too.
1.93K views, 1.1K reads
The article about my sweet but stupid cat accumulated 10 hours of member reads. With a third as much read time as the digital nomad story, you’d think it would earn a third as much. Nope. It earned $17.46 over its lifetime.
Part of the difference is that the digital nomad story attracted non-Medium readers who became members. Whereas the stupid cat story attracted cat-loving Medium members who read the stories in the Catness publication.
1.8K views, 335 reads
My sixth most popular article was also published in Catness. However, this one contained a video. I’m not sure how the search pages present information, but they clearly like web pages that include videos. Why? Because almost all of the views for this article (97%) are external. As a result, the article only earned $.59 over its lifetime.
The image for this story isn’t that great — it’s a blurry freeze frame from a video taken with my phone. It’s a great illustration of the kitten in question carrying a toy almost as big as she is. It seems to encourage people who like videos to click on the article. Would using a more traditional photo attract more readers instead of video watchers? Would putting the video further down the article get them to read to the end, instead of quitting after the video plays?
Conclusions
So, what did I learn from analyzing my most popular stories?
First, the number of views and reads has very little bearing on the amount of money the story earns. The range of payouts on stories that could all legitimately be called viral, with over 1000 reads, ranged from $1 — $107. That’s a crazy range.
Second, people may love stories about cats. They happily share links to cat stories with their cat-loving friends. But those friends do not convert to Medium membership. People who watch cat videos do not read complete articles as much as people who read stories about cats.
People who look for the answers to obscure computer problems do convert to paying Medium memberships. Not, however, using my referral link, so the payment for each conversion is pretty small.
Finally, answering questions posed by readers can be an excellent source of material for articles. If one reader wonders about it, more may wonder as well. If enough of those readers are Medium members, their curiosity can pay quite well.
I’m not sure if this information helps to predict what articles are likely to go viral in the future. Maybe I should write about a digital cat who is experiencing computer errors. I’m sure that would be a huge hit.
