VALUABLE WRITING TIPS

How Does Medium Describe the CORRECT Way to Read Your Publication Stats?

Stop and consider how your stats really work!

If you’re a Medium publication owner and you’re not exactly sure how your publication stats work, this brief summary should be of help.

This information can be useful, even if you happen to operate a publication that doesn’t accept submissions from other writers.

For instance, only ONE of the four publications that I currently operate, is accepting submissions on a regular basis (Just Like New).

But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in examining and understanding the stats for those other publications.

Daily Justiss doesn’t accept submissions, but this is my number one active publication, so yes, I’m interested in the stats.

I’m also curious about the stats for my other two pubs, although I only occasionally publish stories in: Black Like Me, and Let’s Get Paid!

But who knows; learning more about the stats might possibly motivate me to publish more, and help me improve their readership.

That is why I went straight to the horse’s mouth, to read what Medium had to say about publication stats.

The following paragraphs share some highlights taken from the Medium Help Center.

How to read your publication stats

The first thing to recognize, is the fact that Medium provides us with three graphs in the Overview of our stats.

• Through the use of these graphs, we’re able to analyze the total amount of time that people have spent reading your publication [Minutes read].
• You also get details about the total number of views (on all the posts and all the pages), that your publication has received [Views].
• And finally, you get informed about the average number of unique visitors who visit your publication daily [Visitors].

I know first-hand how helpful this type of information can be to a publication owner/editor.

For instance, now I know how Medium counts each visitor to a publication just one time per day.

This is true, no matter how many times or how many pages they visit during the day.

Publication owners and editors realize how this knowledge can come in handy when it comes to their publishing methods.

If you’re a smart editor, you can figure out how to use the publication details and stats to your advantage.

More writing advice about publication stats

While I spent time reading content in Medium’s Help Center, I found a few additional pieces of writing advice, related to publication stats.

For instance:

By clicking on the “Stories” tab, you’re able to access stats for each of the stories published by your publication.

This is great, because it allows you to go back as far as 30 days. Simply clicking on a story’s title will also allow you to have a view of the past thirty days for that story.

Awesome, right?

And by the way, just in case anyone is in the dark about the difference between views and reads, Medium breaks it down like this:

“Views are the number of visitors who clicked on a story’s page, while Reads tells you how many viewers have read the entire story (an estimate).”

Needless to say, knowing these stats can be helpful to writers who write the stories, but also to publications that publish these stories.

The same can be said about understanding the source of traffic to Medium stories that editors publish.

In the same way that you check the traffic for your own individual stories, publications can check the source of external story views.

Call me crazy, but with all the information that’s available in our publication stats, there must be a lot of ways to take advantage of this resource!

Final Thoughts

Now that you’ve considered the information I just shared, hopefully, you’ll take it upon your self, to visit the Medium Help Center, and learn more about this potentially profitable topic.

As we all know, any information that can help improve the reach and the appeal of our stories, can ultimately help increase our earnings.

So, if you don’t already make it a habit to check in on what the officials at Medium have to say on different subjects, you should.

To help point you in the right direction, you can take a few moments to read what I previously wrote on the subject.

Thanks for visiting…