Distributed… and Featured?

Is there a higher tier of curation?

Pretty much every writer on Medium wants to be curated. While it’s been established that it isn’t exactly the Holy Grail of writing on Medium, it’s still desirable. There seems to be a lot of debate over just how helpful curation can be for your viewing figures, and the level of assistance it provides seems to fluctuate. But if there’s one thing for certain, it’s that it’s nice.

It’s like a reassuring pat on the back to tell you that your writing is of a good standard. Of course, not getting curated doesn’t mean your writing isn’t great — some of what I consider to be my best work has been overlooked. But curation is confirmation that at least one other person agrees with your judgement — and that’s nice.

But one of my most recent articles has revealed the possibility of something more. On the stats screen, when you open up the details of a specific story, you see a number of graphs relating to the story’s performance. On the Views graph, if a story has been curated, you’ll notice a little green dot indicating the day it was distributed.

However, for this story, it said Distributed and Featured. I’d never seen this before, so I looked back over most of my old stories and this is the first time it has appeared.

So what does it mean?

I’m not sure. I don’t even know if it’s a new thing, or if it’s always been around but just eluded me. It suggests it’s been given greater prominence somewhere, though I’m not sure where. It was distributed in the Parenting and Outdoors topics, but my story didn’t come up when I searched those terms (though I didn’t think to check until the following morning).

Here’s the story, for anyone interested in checking it out:

Did it have any effect on views?

Again, I’m not sure. But something has had an effect, because views have increased. I’m yet to have any significant success on Medium and many of my stories struggle to get viewing stats in double figures. This one, however, almost hit 200 by the end of its first full day. But there could be another reason.

This month I began a writing challenge in which I’m attempting to write 30 articles in 30 days. Other people doing a similar challenge have set themselves the task of also submitting each of these 30 articles to 30 different Medium publications. Personally, I’ve never been great at ‘putting myself out there’ so I’ve avoided publications up until now. So I’ve set myself the less daunting task of submitting to 10 different publications. It’s still outside my comfort zone, but more manageable. I’ve written more about the challenge, and what I hope to gain from it, here:

The story in question was written with this in mind and published in The Good Men Project’s A Parent is Born (and retitled by the publication for the phrase to be more recognisable to its American audience — I live in Wales).

It’s normally a few days or more before I find out if I’m lucky enough to see chosen for further distribution appearing in the stats. But for this story, it was there the first time I checked after receiving a notification to say it had been published.

I noted in my review of my first year’s curated stories that it doesn’t seem to make a difference if you make it into a big publication or not. But perhaps I spoke to soon. This is the biggest publication I’ve had success with to date, so it would be foolish to rule out there being a link between this and the swift, elevated curation.

But what was the key to the uptick in views? Was it being ‘featured’, or was it simply acceptance into a larger publication? There’s only one way to be sure, and that’s to keep writing. If I get accepted into the same publication again, but this time curated and not featured, I’ll have my answer.

In the meantime, if anyone knows more about this, feel free to educate me in the comments!