THE SECRETS OF WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 1

I’ve solved Medium’s algorithms — get ready to become rich.

Are you ready to take the plunge?

My friend Gutbloom and I have criticized and satirized Medium for a number of years now, deconstructing the absurdity of faux self-help gurus, listicles, tech bros and the unknowable power of Medium to shower some writers with mountains of positive reader feedback.

He has had far more success than me because, I suspect, of his highly sophisticated data driven content analysis, which yields such irresistible headlines as this all-time most popular article:

Of course, there are other classics, such as “I’m Starting to Hate Medium,” “What I Want From Medium,” and the never to be forgotten “To Celebrate The Fourth of July I Murdered a Porcupine.”

To give you some context, one of my most popular articles ever got over 1,400 views, while Gutbloom’s most popular article got over 1,400 claps.

Now, back in the days of silly green hearts, the need to be popular could be written off as personal vanity. In one of my all-time favorite articles, I did a deep dive into internal versus external validation, writing a quasi-pseudo-Buddhist meditation on the sound of one hand typing™:

…anything we do in response as we write a story — smile, laugh, cry, exhale, scream, fart, etc. — is the same as hearing the tree fall in the forest, because…

The saying does not read ‘if a tree falls in a forest and less than an arbitrarily desired number of people (determined by the tree’s current popularity and mood at the time — was the tree in a particularly needy place in its life at the moment it fell?) hear it, did it make a sound?”

But that all changed this morning when I read this email from Medium’s Partner Program:

Based on member engagement from July: 57% of writers or publications who wrote at least one story for members earned money. 7.9% of active writers earned over $100. $22,639.47 was the most earned by a writer, and $6,720.35 was the most earned for a single story.

Now we’re talking about an arbitrarily determined response that now attaches a monetary component to impact our fragile self worth connected to the highly subjective topic of our personal writing.

In other words, if you thought Medium was fucking with you before, you ain’t see nothing yet.

Not only do your tireless literary labors have zero monetary value, but the same regurgitated self help pablum, tech bro preening, and life hacks everyone hates are being compensated directly by Medium!

To paraphrase the great George Carlin, have you noticed that their shit turns to gold, and our gold turns to shit?

I don’t know about you, but the writers I value the most on Medium are still virtually unknown, while the content marketers are being financially rewarded for their social media skills and ceaseless efforts of self promotion.

I addressed this issue back in the day and found that what really matters had nothing to do with following best writing practices, humor, creating unique graphics, or mentioning famous people. All that counted was the subject matter.

I decided to do another quick assessment of the state of Medium, and what makes money for people who often dwarf Gutbloom’s impressive numbers.

Before I present my findings, based on the most popular articles in my feed today, I wanted to share this article I found by a data expert who collected and analyzed almost one million Medium stories.

The biggest insights from his article are the following:

1. 2,000 claps is the gold standard for writing success at Medium. That represents the top 1%.
2. Only 1.2% of the 230,000 authors on Medium had written an article with more than two thousand claps.
3. Only 0.157% of those 230,000 authors posted two articles that received more than 2,000 claps.
4. Only .093% (less than 1/10 of one percent) posted more than four articles that received more than 2,000 claps.
5. When you look at the stats of the Gods of Medium, their consistently high clap rate means they are part of a group of about 100 people.
6. 61.3% of all articles receive less than 10 claps.

None of this speaks to the quality of the writing. The author assumes the content is consistently strong over a long period of time, so each writer builds a large following.

But this sounds more like correlation instead of causation.

Obviously, our ability to judge writing is highly subjective, so I’m going to let the authors’ tags describe the tone and subject of their articles. From today’s feed, I found nine articles that made the top 1%, and a tenth that came in just shy of 2,000 claps, so I chose another article by the writer that met the standard. The point of this exercise is not to dump on any specific author, but to see if the most popular curated stories by Medium have any similarities.

Here are my “findings.”

Think of them as the “eye test” observations I make about sports, while looking to see if advanced statistics back up my analysis:

1. These 10 articles have over 36,400 claps combined.
2. The distribution of tags was Culture (4), Politics (2), Sex (2), Sexuality (2), Relationships (2), Race/Racism (2), Life Lessons (2), Self Improvements (2), and Humor (2), plus a number of single entries. (Note: The only misleading tag was “humor,” as there wasn’t one thing that even came close to resembling wit. Talking about a big dick is not intrinsically funny, even though it could be a funny subject. Nor is mumbling the same old self-help advice — it is dull and tedious.)
3. To summarize the articles by category: Social Media/Culture Wars (2), Politics/Class Warfare (2), Self Help (2), Tech Bros and Hos (2), and Sex (2).
4. To summarize the articles by the authors’ approach: analysis/reportage (2), software development (2), personal tell-alls (2), social media rants (2) and self help regurgitation (2).
5. (Subjective) I thought three of the articles presented interesting, non-technical perspectives and were worth reading.
6. All 10 articles were written at a level far above the generally recommended 6th grade reading level: 9–10th grade (4), 11–12th grade (2), college student (3), and college graduate (1).
7. Woman authors dominated the ranks by 6–3.
8. Popularity by number of followers: 27-33K (3); 4–7K (2), 1.2K (1), and under 1K (3).
9. 2,000 clap stories: More than 2 (7, and one of them had two of these stories in the same feed — wow!); only 1 (2).
10. Best bang per word: 3 minutes or less (4); 5–6 minutes (3); over 8 minutes (3).
11. Boring, lazy writing by category: sex (2/2); self-help (1/2); politics/culture/social media (0/4).

Conclusions

1. The data backed up my observation that humor has little to do with hitting a home run on Medium. In fact, it might be counter-productive as the stuff you find witty or edgy will go over the head of some of your audience, turn off some others, and infuriate that small group of zealots, trolls and assorted assholes who are looking for something to flame.
2. Having expertise is completely overrated. Aside from the tech people, the range of real expertise ranged from excellent (1 person who was a political speech writer) to a few people good at building a large group of followers through reconstituted data-driven content (3), to people just giving their personal experience (3). (Note: As an experiment, I should port my tennis relating articles over to Medium, because that is the one area where I know I’m in the 1% (top writer on Quora, with 220,000 views this month, and thousands of total up votes.)
3. The tags don’t lie. Write the shit people want to read about. Sex confessionals are the easiest, because you can just write down your fantasies (or the synopsis of an old porn video on VHS*), as long as you’re not embarrassed when it shows up on your mom’s feed. Also, jumping in with another opinion on social justice or politics, while boring and totally unnecessary to saving the world does have its financial advantages. Finally keep on mining those self help clichés. It may get old for all the people who hate their feed, but there are always enough new bright-eyed noobies who will think you’re a gosh darn guru — unless, of course, you challenge them to think for themselves, or make them uncomfortable by pointing out their limited perspective.
4. Don’t get old. While one would think a person who spends their life mastering some subject or skill would be a valued voice in the Medium community, that is far from the case. Millennials dominate the ranks of the top writers. One woman just outside of the Millennial age range is 40, and only one man is over 50, but he draws cartoons, so he comes off as being a little younger, even though he sounds a little too preachy.
5. Craft and research are also wildly overrated. Don’t waste time proofing when you can have Grammarly spit out perfectly solid text with the push of a button. Only three articles were well researched and aimed at reporting a story as objectively as possible. Of them, two were the tech articles. That leaves only one political analyst who came at the subject from three different perspectives and tying them together.
6. The writing of the top one percenters is no better than yours or mine. And it certainly isn’t better than the writing of the people I have enjoyed reading the most. I know it’s subjective, but if being funny or witty has no place among the most elite writers as Medium, how else is someone going to develop a unique voice in their writing? I felt like four of the writers could have done an equally good job as their peers if they have switched stories, and I don’t know if their style or perspective would have altered the story all that much. Here are a few writers who have always impressed me by their ability to educate or amuse me, show me perspectives beyond my own ability to view a subject, or simply write such beautiful prose that I would enjoy reading their shopping lists: Abbey Norman, Lizella Prescott, Henry Wismayer, Holly Wood, Victoria Easterday, Jonathan Carroll, Kel Campbell, Ben Thomas, Thaddeus Howze, Notorious DCI, Ellie Guzman, Brandon Anderson, Lisa Renee, and Gutbloom. (Note for reference below: 7 women and 7 men.)
7. A little cleavage never hurts. I don’t recommend men try this, but it definitely seemed to helped a couple of the weakest female writers. Before you come for me with torches and pitchforks, know that of the three articles I though had value, two were written by women. But the worst articles I read were written by women who showed a little bit of cleavage in their profile pictures, and one used a sexy picture for her article cover art. To be fair, in an article about sex, she didn’t have much of a choice, as there was no way she could display a big shot of a penis.
8. Put all your energy and resources into social media and building a large group of followers. There may be no way to ever figure out the correlation between outstanding writing and number of followers, but there is no doubt about the correlation between having thousands of followers and having 2,000 clap stories. It’s a lot easier if 5% of your 4,000 followers like your story and clap ten times than hoping that 50% of your 400 followers clap ten times for your story. Or having 10% of your 400 fans clapping 50 times each.

One final note

In response to the cancer that infected the national media at the end of 2015, spread throughout an entire political party in 2016, and finally metastasized in White House since January 2017, I swore to eliminate as much contact as possible with this disease. I focused on writing only about sports, humor and popular movies and TV.

For this reason, I am unwilling to sacrifice my peace of mind and relative comfort for the chance to become a one percenter. I have neither the youth, the social media genius, nor the cleavage to follow the path I found, but I look forward to hearing all of your success stories in the future.

While I can’t do it, maybe you can!**

Here’s to better writing.

*After my dad died at age 102, we were cleaning out his stuff and found an old porn video titled “Oral Arguments.” He had been hospitalized at the end of 2008, recovered and then came to live with our family for the next 10 years, so I don’t know how he could have watched the tape at our place.

Still, it’s reassuring to think he might have still been active sexually over the age of 90. On the other hand, the sad idea of being old and alone while masturbating is only beaten off by the 229,900 writers who will struggle in vain for years in the hopes of finding validation through Medium, that cruel mistress.

**I’ve been advised by one of the Gods of Medium to end on an inspirational note. Hope this works.

[UPDATE/SHAMELESS PLUG: Good news readers! Cracking Medium’s algorithm has helped take my writing to a whole nother level (grammatically correct according to the Webster’s dictionary), as my story “An Open Letter to Writers Who Write to Other Writers About Writing” was curated under the topic of Writing.

What does that tell you? First, I have been officially anointed by the curators as an important voice on the subject of writing. And second, they violated their own rules by curating my story.

Oh, the sweet absurdity.

Here’s a screen shot to prove the story was curated, just in case they realize their error and remove the story.]