I Found the Top 5 Publications and Their Most-Read Stories on Medium.
I did research for January 2024 and I didn’t expect that!
Not a member? Read this story here.
Are you submitting to the right publications? How many visitors do they have monthly? Do they have the right audience for your niche?
I did some research.

And I’m surprised to find out who’s on the list of the…
TOP 5 Publications on Medium
top publications according to Semrush, ordered by monthly visits in Jan’24 are:
the Top 5 Publications according to Semrush, ordered by monthly visits in Jan’24 are:
- Illumination — 2.2 million visits
- The Startup — 1,9 million visits
- The Authority Magazine — 1,2 million visits
- Geek Culture — 1,2 million visits
- javarevisited — 925k visits
Millions of visits monthly! That’s huge!
And I’m exited to see Illumination leading this chart! I knew they’re popular, but didn’t expect them to be in TOP 1!
The good news: I’m already a writer there, so I should be good to go, I thought.
NO. Not really…Having lots of views, doesn’t mean it’s right for my niche!
Lesson learned from this research:
- make data driven decisions.
- validate ideas.
- analyze and revisit past choices.
This is what I mean.
The most read stories on Illumination

- The Man Under the Toilet
- What are the Best Topics for Article Writing?
- Why Instagram Influencers Are Letting Wealthy Men Poop In Their Mouths.
- Ten Habits that will get you ahead of 99% of People
- What Porn Does to Your Brain and How to Quit
The most read stories on The Startup

- Don’t Just Set Goals. Build Systems
- 11 Companies Making $1M+ That Are [Practically] Bedroom Businesses
- MVI Architecture with Android
- 10 Habits That Are Damn Hard to Do, But Pay off Forever
- Setting Up OpenGL for Windows
I could’t firnd data for the Authority Magazine, so moving on to the
Most read stories on Geek Culture

- How I Created a Stunning Personal Website for Free with Github Pages
- React Native Generate APK — Debug and Release APK
- How to get Github Copilot for 100% free
- How I Track My Tasks in Obsidian
Moving on to the
Most read stories on javarevisited

- 10 Best Books for Data Structure and Algorithms for Beginners in Java, C/C++, and Python
- 10 REST API Basic Interview Questions
- 10 Reasons to Learn System Design in 2024
The Bottom Line
I have mixed feelings about Illumination…I started there because I saw lots of other successful writers submit, but never thought about niche or audience. Fool!
Key take-away: I’ll make better choices about which articles to submint where in order to reach who!
And I’ll consider new publications.
Anyway…
I hope this research gave you some food for thought about what’s popular on Medium and what are readers looking for in some of the publications.

And by the way, let me know if you’d like more stories like this in the future.
Thanks for Reading!
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