Does the Algorithm Reward New Content?
Do your earnings increase as soon as you publish a new article, even if this article only attracts little interest?
This article is something of an experiment. It’s meant to test my theory that Medium’s algorithm pushes my old pieces as soon as I publish fresh content.
How did I come up with this idea? I’ve noticed time and time again that my earnings increase significantly on days when I publish something again after a while without an article. Seldom could this be explained by the latest article alone because many of them didn’t perform very well.
But even if the new article only got 23 views, my daily earnings often increased by over twenty percent compared to the previous day. Now, if this money didn’t come from the new article, it can only mean that on those days, other, older articles suddenly found more readers than the day before.
I assume that new articles trigger the Medium algorithm. It looks at the article and the associated author, rediscovers old articles by that author, and shows a few of them again to some readers to whom it had not shown them before.
On the one hand, this is probably explained by Medium’s suggestions for further articles under each article. Many of them will come from the author of the current article and thus find potential readers again.
On the other hand, this is still not enough to explain that my earnings are significantly higher on days when I publish something new. Even if I have the same number of views and reads as the day before, I earn more money when posting a recent article.
To understand why that is, you have to keep one thing in mind: The longer it takes Medium to get a reader to read an article, the more likely that reader is only going to read a few articles a month anyway. So this reader’s reading time is worth more because his monthly contribution is divided among a few authors.
Medium thus seems to recommend older articles preferentially to readers who read less frequently. This is the only way to explain that my income is higher on days when I publish articles than when I don’t post anything. I emphasize again that this is the case even if the number of views and reads is the same on both days.
How do I find out if my assumption is correct?
Of course, I can’t prove my theory based on a one-time experiment. This is not a scientific study, and I am not a statistician. But I’ll look at what I earned today tomorrow. Last month, my average earnings were $2.65 a day. So if my theory is correct, I should be making significantly more than that average today.
I’ll know more tomorrow. I’ll report how this little experiment turned out.
Until then, I’d be interested to know what you think. Have you had similar experiences to mine? Do any of you perhaps even have reliable figures to support or refute my theory? Again, I am curious to hear from you.
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