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When’s The Best Day To Publish on Medium? (Preliminary Results)

I’m shocked, honestly.

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A little over a week ago, I asked the question:

I created an experiment on my first account to figure it out.

The premise was simple. My first account has a small but loyal following interested in learning Tarot. I pre-wrote and scheduled 7 articles to be published every day at 8:00 EST. All of these articles were in the same publication, with the same tags, and about learning Tarot.

Now, all of these scheduled articles are posted.

It takes about 2 weeks for a story's stats to fall off. Since some of these articles are less than 3 days old, this is only a preliminary look at my findings. For final findings, we will have to wait another week or so.

Here is the raw data.

Peak day refers to the day the article received the most traffic. I put N/A for the three articles less than a few days old.

I did calculate the average of both reads and views, but this data is unreliable — comparing an article 1 day old to one 1-week-old isn’t fair.

As I said, this data is preliminary.

This data shows that the article that performed the best was the first. I’m not saying that means Tuesday is the best to post. This data pool is small and has unfinalized numbers.

However, I didn’t want to just leave this article at that. So, I looked at my most popular stories of all time on my first account. Here’s what I found.

This is interesting.

First, Saturday takes the cake. Also, most of my most popular articles peaked within 4 days. This data set shows that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday dominate over Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

From the first data set, my articles published on Tuesday and Wednesday peaked much slower than those published Thursday through Saturday.

I have one more aspect to address.

I began this experiment due to hearing some gossip that the first few hours of your article’s life are the most important. How accurate is that?

That gossip doesn’t seem very accurate at all.

Our highest day 1 number is also our lowest total read number. Our second-highest total read number is our second-lowest day 1 number. Our highest total reads number follows the averages more closely than any other data set.

Interesting…

I have analyzed some of my most popular stories on this account, and my findings were equally ambiguous.

From the data I have so far, Medium has a slight tendency to prefer articles published Thursday through Saturday at 3:00 pm EST. Other than that, publication time is not a significant factor in growth.

I will keep collecting data to expand my data pool, but for now, I’ll say this: Be careful about whose advice you take about Medium. I’ve heard publication time matters from several reputable and well-followed writers here. So far, I have nothing to suggest that what they’re saying is based on the truth.

It doesn’t seem to matter what day you publish.

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