How Many Stories Are Published on Medium Each Month?
And why the average post makes $1.20 in total
“There is no new thing under the sun.” — King Solomon (maybe)
Just as with that very old quote from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the same is mostly true for blogging too.
According to Oberlo, there’s currently over about 600 million blogs on the world wide web in 2020.
It gets even more astounding when you think of how active those blogs are. Quoracreative puts that at about 1.4 new blog posts per month, on average.
- Or 29 million new blog posts each day.
- Or 850 million new blog posts each month.
- Or 10.2 billion per year.
I’m feeling behind on my reading already.
But what about little ol’ Medium.com?
Well, for the quick answer:
There are 1,385,000 new articles posted on Medium.com every month.
This is of course from my own calculations (shown below).
I searched and searched and couldn’t find an up to date answer for 2020 on Mr. Google.
So I found some reference points, loaded up a few tools, and made the below calculations.
Some quick Medium stats
Let’s start back in November 2018, about 22 months ago.
Medium was all over the news for an unfortunate round of layoffs after changing their business model away from advertising.
In this article from Business Insider, it stated that Medium had 90 million unique visitors per month, with 20,000 new articles each day.
And in a recent post by Mr. Ev Williams himself (the CEO of Medium), he showed a very interesting stats chart:
How many articles are posted on Medium.com every month?
November 2018:
- New articles per day — 20,000
- New articles per week — 140,000
- New articles per month — 591,000
- New articles per year — 7,092,000
September 2020:
- New articles per day — 47,000
- New articles per week — 328,000
- New articles per month — 1,385,000
- New articles per year — 16,614,000
Medium statistics and assumptions
November 2018:
- Business Insider article — 90 M unique visitors, 591k new articles
- Ev’s shared stats chart (above)— 178 M page views
- Derived assumption — 1.98 visits /mth
- Average views per article — 301
September 2020:
- SEO tools — 215 M visits, 119 M unique visitors, 1.81 visits /mth
- Ev’s shared stats chart — 417 M visits
- Derived assumption — 230 M unique visitors
- Average views per article — 301 (assumption of unchanged)
What’s my sloppy methodology?
Ev’s chart:
Using an ancient tool of mathematics — a ruler — I came up with 1,250 million page visits in the last quarter based on Ev’s chart.
If we track back to November of 2018, we can see around Q3 that year is about 560 million page views, with about 510 million for Q2.
Let’s split the difference and say 535 million — or 178 million page views per month in late 2018.
Business Insider:
If we apply the 90 million unique visitors' reference from the Business Insider article and compare it to the 178 M page visits, that means each user visits Medium.com 1.98 times per month in November 2018.
SEO tools:
To double-check Ev’s chart, I fired up some of my favorite SEO tools and checked out today’s numbers:
- SEMrush — 224 million visits, 149 M unique visitors, 1.5 visits per month
- SimilarWeb — 193 M visits, 116 M unique visitors, 1.67 visits per month
- Statshow — 227 M visits, 91 M unique visitors, 2.5 visits per month
The numbers are a bit varied (as they always are), so we’ll split the differences:
- 215 M visits
- 119 M unique visitors
- 1.81 visits per month
Note the total page visits are off by almost half, but since these tools are known more for their benchmarking ability rather than the exact real numbers — I’ll take it.
Average views per article:
If we take November’s total website visits (178 M) and divide it by the articles posted that month (591k), we get an average of 301 views per article posted.
Not actually that bad, I expected much lower, to be honest — and based on my history when first starting out here.
Any caveats?
Of course. I’m not a statistician by training, just by hobby and curiosity.
I also like to blend things down slightly to help readability. That means I rounded up/down and also carried over some assumptions from the past.
The actual numbers could be much higher or lower, but I suspect I’m somewhere in the ballpark. If any reader finds new information on this subject, please comment!!!
What does this mean for you?
Well, it gives you an idea of the competition — how many high-quality articles can you post each month to compete with the 1.4 million other articles being posted?
Or in monetary terms, and taken from my other recent analysis, Medium writers earn in total about $1.65 million per month.
That rounds out to about $1.20 per article on Medium in 2020!
Food for thought the next time you spend too long making an article. Kind of like my 50-hour endeavor making this below piece over the last few weeks:
It’s made about $10 so far off 1,000 views. Not bad for an article. Very bad for 50 hours of work.
But at least it was incredibly interesting to create — and that’s half the battle.
Or perhaps you’ll be one of the lucky ones to also make $49,581.31 next month (as someone did in August 2020).
Hell, I’d be incredibly stoked just to get anywhere near the top performing article of $9,958.82 that same month.
One last way to look at it, again with numbers from that other analysis:
- Roughly 175,000 writers on Medium
- 116,200 of those writers made at least something ($0.01+)
- And a nice 10,850 (6.2%) earned over $100 in August (including my lucky self!)
Are these numbers huge? No, but they’re growing.
And that’s the important part.
I want to continue being a part of Medium’s journey, and any readers that will spend their precious time reading my goofy deep dives.
As part of that commitment, at least for the past 11 months, I’ve been working hard at it to get better as a writer, gain more viewers, and hopefully help more and more people learn new stuff every day.
I guess the final question I haven’t answered is, will you be in that 6.2% next month?
I hope so.
Thanks for reading, Mediumites.
Keep up with my guides, rants, deep dives, and crazy shenanigans with my free newsletter. Thanks and have a great day!
