I Think I Sabotaged My Story’s Earnings

From 250 To 8 Views In 3 Days. A Possibly Cautionary Tale

I should preface this by saying, I’m making some assumptions. I don’t know for sure if the changes I made had an ill effect on my story.

Whether here on Medium or other platforms, stories have a natural life cycle. I’m oversimplifying, but I wouldn’t expect a well-performing article to continue its success indefinitely.

I had one article outperforming every other one I’d written. It had the distinction of being my first article chosen for distribution. This happened eleven days after release.

Here‘s an overview of the numbers.

• Day One: 3 views.
• Day Two: 21 views
• Day Four: 31 views. This was the article’s best day before distribution.
• Day Eleven-:17 Views. Chosen for distribution.
• Day Fifteen: 74 Views.
• Day Seventeen: 108 Views.
• Day Twenty-One: 79 views.

At that point, the article appeared to pick up steam.

• Day Twenty-Two: 161 Views.
• Day Twenty-Three: 250 Views.

I was ecstatic. This wasn’t a huge payout, or at least not yet. While I did not expect the article to continue to get hundreds of views a day, I did expect the popularity to last longer.

I did expect it to keep getting views and reads.

That gave me an idea.

The Idea

At the end of Day Twenty-Three, I decided to take advantage of the article’s success. When I’d first written it, it was my only article in its category. It was also one of my earliest stories.

Now, I had other stories. So I edited the ending, adding in links to those stories.

This article was published in, In Fitness and in Health. As such, I decided to link first to another article in the same publication, and one in an unrelated pub.

What happened to the views?

• Day Twenty-Four: My views declined from 250 to 46.
• Day Twenty-Five: Views were down to 19.
• Day Twenty-Six: 8 Views.
• Day Twenty-Seven: 11 Views.

Now the real question: Why?

I have a theory. I’ve not been able to corroborate it, but it makes sense. I think I messed up Medium’s distribution algorithm for my article.

If you think about it, there is a possible reason for this. Without human intervention, Medium doesn’t know what changes I made. I could have done something that disqualified the article from distribution. I didn’t, but the algorithm probably doesn’t know that.

Sadly, since it’s already been chosen, I doubt it will get any human eyes on it either to fix the problem.

87% of my traffic has been internal. It hasn’t occurred to me until just this moment to track the external numbers, but I suspect most of the new views are now coming from external sources.

The takeaway?

Remember that I cannot confirm my suspicion. But the circumstantial evidence is enough for a personal conviction. When I have an article that is performing well, I will not make changes to it. This goes double for articles chosen for distribution.

How about you? Have you had a similar experience? Better yet, have you changed an article and had it begin to perform better after the fact? I’d love to hear about it. You can find me here on Medium, or on Twitter at TheWriteScott.

Happy connecting. And, if you’re curious, here is the article in question.

Scott Hughey knows what the next step should be. It’s the same step as always. Write more. Produce more. If you build it, they will come.