Medium Stats Are Broken

We all like to check our Medium stats (probably way too much), here’s a good reason to stop

I woke up yesterday, did my usual routine of getting ready to fight the day, and sat down to leave. That’s one of my favorite moments of the morning lately because it’s when I get to check my Medium performance for the day before!

I opened up the app, and bam, 403 views for the previous day, and somehow, already 200 views that morning — by only 8 am! Maybe those aren’t big numbers for some of you, but it was at least triple what I’ve normally been getting this month.

In a gleeful mood, I went about the rest of my morning routine until around noon when its the other nice part of Medium-day — seeing how much I earned from the day before. The previous day had been around $10, which was amazing as last month I was getting $0.50 or so a day on average.

Surely with double the views, I could be expecting $15, $20, maybe even $30 if I was lucky.

Nope, it was about $3.

“That’s f*cky,” I thought. Maybe the results were delayed and remembered the previous day’s balance wrong. Nope, I went and checked.

By this time, the current day’s views had already passed the 403 from the day before.

What was going on

I was a bit perplexed. Not being the kind of person to let little mysteries go unsolved, I went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out the unbalance in the penny-making force.

I looked through each of my articles to see where the views were coming from, around 40 in total. I saw there was a general increase, and one published story had about 20 more views than the day before, but that is way short of 600.

I did some lazy math and counted up all the fans for each article, comparing them to the total graph:

The numbers were mostly the same as the above, and I didn’t bother recounting them specifically, figuring I had just made a +-5 error in the math.

That still didn’t solve my question, where were all these views from and why didn’t I earn from them?

It’s all stories remember

Looking around the stats page for other potential clues, I started clicking all the links and digging the rabbit hole ever deeper.

I had never checked the ‘Responses’ section before. Never really cared to. If someone replied to me it would show up in my notifications and I would respond from there.

What I didn’t know, nor would I have assumed, is that all of the stats on the page also include your responses. I just never really noticed before as I didn’t have many views, claps, nor reads from my responses.

Even when I noticed slight discrepancies in the total stats, I assumed it was just another bug in Medium’s algorithms that we see from time to time.

I scrolled down to this little golden nugget and sighed:

The most-read post I’ve ever made on Medium, and it’s a two-sentence comment on another article! (For reference, my 2nd most read post is only around 200 views sadly).

I dug a little further and realized that the post I made that reply on was very likely using Facebook ads to boost the views too. This is one of the Medium publications, wonder who’s paying for that hmm?

Why do I assume that? Mostly because nearly all the comments on that story have 0 interaction. No claps, no replies, the numbers are just too big to be viewed by humans and not have an agreeing or dissenting response.

But that’s okay, there are no rules against using Facebook ads to boost stories here. There are rules against bots, but that can’t be helped if it’s a 3rd party doing it.

It helps Medium grow and the author gain visibility, if the campaigns are successful. If they aren’t, at least Roboterberg can buy another super spicy sour pumpkin latte from Starbucks the next day.

(For those wondering, no I haven’t used Facebook ads myself)

Stories not articles

The main point here is why are these being counted in the statistics? It’s because Medium continues to state the gleefully useless statement that all posts on Medium are ‘stories’, not just simple blog posts or replies, people.

Before I made this popular comment (that is still accumulating lots of views even today), I could check my stats whenever I wanted and see how the articles, sorry, stories were doing for the day.

I even have a general formula for how much the earnings will be if I know the number of views each day. It’s been decently accurate for the last 4 weeks as well.

That formula is completely useless now as I don’t know how many people are viewing just my articles versus my replies. Since I enjoy interacting with the community here, I’m not going to stop replying either.

So that leaves me with no relevant statistics unless I want to follow each story, but that’s time-consuming and only gets harder the more we publish over time.

Any way around it?

As far as I’ve checked, there’s no other way to see statistics for only your articles right now. I thought about just using reads or claps, but those are counted too.

Not to mention that claps have decreased in general quite a lot since the MPP changes removed the monetary incentive for them.

The app is even worse for this, as to my knowledge it only shows views (no reads or claps for total stats view).

That leaves me with checking stories individually and waiting for the next day to see earnings for the previous day — which I have a strong theory aren’t fully accurate anyway (until the next month):

Being thankful on Thanksgiving

I’m not American, so my Thanksgiving holiday is a month before, but the point stands. This article is coming off as a complaint, but that’s more my issue with the product managers at Medium.

They’ve created an amazing platform but it feels like they only finished 90% of the job. I get the feeling that they don’t actually use the platforms themselves (and I’ve encountered this problem in previous jobs as a product manager).

But I need to be thankful, this platform has eased my way into a new hobby that I hope to continue for a long time coming.

I also should feel good that my reply got so many reads, in the off chance that it isn’t all Facebook ad bots.

Lastly, I am thankful for the product managers providing me useless statistics because I no longer check my damn phone every 10 minutes to see how a story is performing!

‘Rant’ over.

Have a wonderful day and check out some of my other stuff here — J.J. Pryor