Make These Changes to Your Article to Increase Your Chances of Trending
What to know about Medium’s trending articles
Introduction
So you want to see your articles trending on the Medium home page.
Or maybe you just want to know what most people are looking for when they log in to Medium. Either way, the data explored here can help you understand how to increase your readership.
With a better understanding of the article lengths readers gravitate to, you can ensure your work stands out.
Writerly Income explored some of the data behind the trending articles. Their research might surprise you!
Trending Articles
Wouldn’t it be great to see your article promoted on the front page of Medium?
Imagine how many readers you’d reach if the first thing people saw when they logged in was your article.
Okay, so how can you get there?
The Bad News
Well, the reality is, it’s not easy. In fact, the numbers are stacked against you. With some simple changes, though, you can improve your chances!
According to this article there were 47,000 new posts published per day (in September 2020) on Medium.
With all those articles, it’s really hard to stand out.
The Good News
The good news is that readership seems to be increasing at an accelerated rate as well.
More people are reading Medium than ever before. So there may be more articles But there are also more readers!
Read Times
Read times are posted next to every article. This feature allows potential readers to know what they’re getting into before they click.
So is this information influencing whether or not readers decide to read the article?
I know I’m guilty of letting read times dictate my reading choices. I’d be surprised if I was the only one.
According to Medium’s Help Center, read times are developed by taking the average read rate of an adult (265 words per minute) and calculating how long it would take that person to read the article.
This chart will give you a rough estimate of how different word counts correlate to read times.
Apparently, Medium also takes into account the number of images on an article. So while the chart will give you a general sense of the read times for each word count, actual assigned read time may vary.
The Data
Writerly Income analyzed 14 days worth of trending posts. This works out to 86 articles.
In their analysis, they looked at the average read times for trending articles.
The data spanned read times from an 18-minute read to a 1-minute read.
Despite the range, there does appear to be some trends in read times to consider when publishing an article on Medium.
While the average trending article was just over 6 minutes, the most common article length is 7 minutes.
This means that writing an article that hovers in that 6–7 minute range might be the perfect length where readers are finding enough value while not extending beyond their allotted focus time.
People might be willing, given their interest level, to give 6–7 minutes of time to an article.
If it’s less than that, they may find the article lacking the depth of subject knowledge they’re looking for.
Longer than 7 minutes and they may think it’s just too much of a time commitment.
However, when we look at the next graph, we can see the potential leeway in this read time.
For trending articles, 76% were between 1 minute and 7 minutes. An article 8 minutes or longer makes up only 23% of the trending articles.
With this knowledge, (especially given that there was only one 1-minute article) we should probably lean somewhere to the 2–6 minute range if possible.
Conclusion
In the end, trending would be great. However, if you’re here to reach a small audience or just to get your voice out there, these tips can still help you.
It’s clear that the majority of people reading on Medium want to commit about 6 minutes to an article.
That knowledge can help you satisfy your readers with the amount of time they’re hoping to spend on an article.
In my own observations, most of the trending articles are published through publications.
This probably isn’t a surprise but is worth noting. Large publications provide writers a better chance of reaching a wider audience, getting shared, and ending up as “trending.”
Regardless of your goals, considering your reading time might help you make decisions that will ensure your article reaches readers!