Medium Statistics

Hooray, Hooray! No-Stat May Ends Today!

An anticlimactic end and a meaningful beginning

No-Stat May. A whole month of not checking your Medium stats or earnings. Did you do it? I did. It was totally a thing. If you missed it, you are going to have to wait 11 months for your chance.

Or, you could just do a No-Stat June. I suppose that could be a thing too.

Now that the end of the month is upon us it is a good time to reflect on the experience. It all started when I read this article from Itxy Lopez:

I happened to read it on May 1st, and I made a spontaneous decision to not check my stats for a whole month. Part of my decision was that I was feeling a bit more obsessed with my income than usual because I saw a bit upswing in earnings at the end of April.

That upswing was not from any one article in particular, but a result of what I hoped was steady sustained growth. I earned $60.00 by the end of April and I surmised that if the upswing held fast that I could likely break the $100.00 mark in May.

I knew that if I continued as normal that I would check and fret about my earnings, views, reads, and fans to no end. So, it seemed like a pretty good idea to just go cold turkey and try not to look at all.

Accountability

To make it real, and hold myself accountable, I wrote about it here:

I got several comments on the article, ranging from Joe Luca’s skepticism, “Cold turkey, eh? Keep me posted.” to Steven James who felt that my daily stat peeking before taking May off was merely child’s play, “Holy crap! You’re almost at a quarter of the peeks I take.”

Rasheed Hooda noted that he wanted to be a cool kid too, after I remarked that all the cool kids were doing it. He also said that he was flirting with a $100.00 month in May as well. I am hoping he got there! Let me know.

Providing me with yet another reason to move to Canada, Tree Langdon ♾️ related that with the exchange rate difference, her $10.00 American earnings in April equated to a small fortune in Canadian dollars. I suspect she will be retiring soon if she can double that amount in May!

Kay T. admitted to frequent stat checking (admitting you have a problem is the first step) ;-), but she wasn’t ready to jump in with both feet yet. Rather she thought she might take on a writing challenge rather than a no-stat challenge. I hope she did so and will let me know how it went.

Okay, you might have seen it coming. Two people overtly said that they would (or might) try the May No-Stat Challenge as well. Joanne Troppello🌻 hedged her bet a little bit and said, “Maybe I need to take this challenge too!” And Trista Ainsworth pledged to go no-stat in May also.

So, I will want to hear from you both, how did it go?

Enough razzing of my commenters. Now no one is going to comment on my articles in the future because I might call them out! But for Joe Luca and everyone else, here is what I learned and experienced:

Findings

First off, it wasn’t that difficult. I thought I might have some withdrawal symptoms or cravings, but I really didn’t. One of the times that I would check stats before was as an adjunct when I was between things. For instance, after I hit on an article and in that little moment of, “okay, what do I do next?” I would always check stats.

There were a few times in that “what next” moment that I would feel an urge, but it really wasn’t too bad. Otherwise it was relatively easy to stay away from the stats and earnings buttons.

After just a few days it seemed pretty normal and I began to experience some feeling of being free to just write. That was nice. It wasn’t that I didn’t care anymore, rather I was just scheduling my caring for the end of the month; knowing that focusing on stats and earnings in the moment wasn’t additive to my efforts, but rather a distraction.

It wasn’t all rainbows, kittens and unicorn parties though. There was a period of doldrums in the middle of the month. I had some internal wavering about whether I was really able to be successful if I didn’t know exactly how successful I was?

I had to reflect on my motivation and then remember the ideas in the paragraph above about how it was not that the stats aren’t important, but rather I was setting time aside to focus on them later rather than now. That philosophy got me through.

Cheats

There were some known and unintended glimpses at stats that occurred. The known one was that each Friday morning Medium sends me a weekly stat update. I conceded at the outset that I would likely look at those emails. And, I did.

In some ways that was helpful because it reassured me that things were pretty much going like I had figured they would, at least in terms of views. On the other hand, at day 8 I had a single data point and at day 15, two data points.

Anyone with any experience with statistics knows that having two data points falls on a utility spectrum between “useless” and “misleading”.

Another unintended cheat was that if you “manage responses” on a story, it takes you to a page that happens to display the stats for that particular article along with listing the comments so that you can respond or whatever. Rather than exploiting this “cheat” I tried to respond from the story comment itself and not use the “manage” function. But I did inadvertently see a few story stats.

During this time, I was trying to not pay any attention to my number of followers as well. While not specifically called out as part of the challenge, I figured if I wasn’t obsessing about stats that I shouldn’t obsess about followers either.

I mostly accomplished this, however there are some things (like finding one of your stories from way back when you aren’t sure when you published it) that is just much more efficiently done from your profile page rather than from other sources. Probably 5 or 6 times during the month I ended up visiting my profile page and taking note of follower count.

Take home message

Here is what is going to happen. Tomorrow I will check my stats and earnings for the month. I may or may not have hit the $100.00 mark. I truly have no clue aside from some relative guesstimates based on April views and earnings.

I will spend a little bit of time analyzing my articles to see which were hits and which were duds statistically. I think there is some good intel there that can inform future writing strategies and concepts.

I will also go back and look at past stories for those that I can market more effectively as suggested by Chris Hedges in this article:

Marketing older pieces is just smart asset management and one needs stats to make good decisions about that.

Then, that’s it for stat checking for June. I am not going to be quite as militaristic about it, but I am planning on having daily stat checking be a thing of the past. I think for June a great compromise might be doing some analysis on Fridays when I get the weekly email. I will allow myself to click freely through the stats and earnings pages one day a week.

The rest of the time though, hands off!

It turns out you don’t die if you don’t check your stats incessantly. I proved that. Let’s just see if I can keep up a reasonable approach for the long term.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.