Is A Viral Article Worth The Hype

The gift that keeps on giving.

It happened. The earth moved. No, I haven’t broken down my walls and found myself a lover. I had an article go viral.

Was it worth it? You tell me.

As viral articles go, it was a small win. I’ve seen accounts of some articles scoring reads of 30k and more. But when my article on pumping iron while old started to climb the charts, my eyes blinked in disbelief. That puny little piece?

You can’t tell which article will go viral.

How many stories have I slaved over for hours and days even, that barely got noticed by my readers? I’ve written gems of highly polished prose that even attracted the attention of the curation gods, but instead of sending them off to grab the big bucks, they sank like a stone.

Like so many of you, I’m sure, I’d end up saying, WTF Medium? What is it you want from me?

Not that I can complain. According to what I’ve read, I’ve done better than 50% of writers who earn nothing. I reached the 7% mark in my first month and got curated early and often.

But the big one always eluded me, even though I’ve had popular articles, several that went over a thousand reads. Now I can say I’m no longer a viral virgin, and, all I can say is, yes, it was good for me. And someday, I hope it’s good for all of you. Let me tell you why.

I rushed to publication with this article.

I’ve posted before about this article. I have a goal of publishing every day, and, this one day, the well had run dry. I had too much non-Medium editing work on my plate to make writing on the platform a priority the week of January 20. Adding a quality article each morning had become too much of a challenge.

But I kept trying. I wracked my brain for a topic to interest my readers and had left it until after my workout at the gym. I wrote a rather short piece about a phenomenon I’d noticed concerning the lack of elderly gym rats. I wrote if fast and published it late on the 20th to meet the earnings cutoff. I just wanted a few reads in my daily stats.

I put it in a publication, and the editors picked it up for curation. Nice, very nice. But not a new phenomenon. Also, not a guarantee that it would get a lot of notice, but sometimes articles about my workouts touch a chord with some readers.

A short time later, I checked my stats. This article had started to soar. Like, out of nowhere.

I did nothing special to promote it and haven’t since.

By the end of the day, reads had started to climb, and my earnings had increased. The next day brought a nice surprise as the article began to beat out some of my other top earners.

I didn’t pay much more attention to it because I was focused on developing other articles. But at the end of each day my reads for that post kept increasing, and my earnings kept inching up.

Another tip that a rising tide raises all boats, each morning, my notifications began to rise. Readers were seeing more of my backlist, and my followers were increasing as well.

It didn’t go viral immediately.

However, it wasn’t until January 29, nine days after I published the article, that it went viral.

The day before I published the article, my average daily reads fell into the 240 range. My reads shot up to 429 the day of publication and gradually moved up each day. The gym article took the lead, but every article seemed to do well. On January 29, I woke to a gusher. By the end of the day, I had 2980 reads for the day. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming.

The dropoff the next day was quite sharp. However, now that my reads have leveled off, that article still gets about 100 reads each day. My total reads average 400 a day, considerably more than before I published my viral article.

The significant factor about the power of a viral article, I believe, is that since January 31, my productivity has dropped. This is my second article in February. I haven’t had such a publishing drought since I started writing on Medium. And yet, even though I haven’t published daily for over ten days, my income has almost doubled since before the viral article.

The reads came from inside Medium, important for earnings.

Another important contributor to the success is that almost all of my reads have come from inside Medium. While I’ve had pieces get high numbers of reads, they usually got love from Google. And while that’s nice, those reads seldom came from Medium paying members, so they didn’t boost my earnings.

This article had all the bling you want, internal love from views and readers. The only downside was that it got a very short read time at 53 seconds. Perhaps if I hadn’t been in a rush to publish that day and paid more attention to formatting, or choosing an image, the first readers would have stayed on the page longer. Lesson learned.

I’ve cleared the deck of other editing work, and I’m back to writing daily on Medium. I don’t want to lose this momentum, though I may never have another article with this kind of success. One can only hope.

I wish I could tell you the secret to having an article go viral. I wish I could tell you the secret for getting an article curated.

I just know that if you put in the time working on your craft, it can’t hurt. And if you have an article go viral, you’ll reap many rewards, in earnings, reads, and followers as well as a boost to your backlist.

If a little old lady can do it, surely anyone can.