Medium Writing Tips

Medium Writing Stats Explained

Understanding views, reads, fans, claps, and more!

Getting recognition for your writing on Medium is an amazing feeling! But, in able to replicate your success (or grow your audience), you need to understand the data analytics behind your Medium stories.

Luckily, Medium does offer several built in tools to help monitor traffic and visitor statistics, for any story you publish on Medium. While these stats are available to all writers, many fail to take the time to understand exactly what each metric of data represents.

This understanding is especially critical for new writers, who may focus on a particular statistic, only to realize later, that it was a poor proxy for their definition of success.

T E R M I N O L O G Y

When you are logged into your Medium account, click on your profile picture, and then select “stats” to see the statistics that Medium tracks.

You will now see the stats from your articles over the past 30 days:

By default you will see your article views, broken down by day, for the past 30 days. However, you can also click on the views and fans tabs to switch the stat featured in the chart.

Views — Views are the number of visitors who clicked on a story’s page.

Reads — Reads gives you an estimate of how many viewers have read an entire story.

Read Ratio — Read Ratio is an estimate of the percentage of viewers that reached the end of your story.

Read Time —Read time appears at the top of any Medium article, and is an estimate of how long it will take the reader to complete an article. Read time is based on the average reading speed of an adult (roughly 265 WPM). Medium takes the total word count of a post and translate it into minutes, with an adjustment made for images. Images add an additional 12 seconds for the first image, 11 seconds for the second image, and minus an additional second for each subsequent image, through the tenth image. Any images after the tenth image are counted at three seconds.

For posts in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, read time is a function of the number of characters (500 characters/min) with a similar adjustment made for images.

Claps/Applause — Claps are Medium’s chosen metric, to measure reader support of an article (AKA Applause). Readers can clap up to 50 times per post. Claps play a major role in determining Medium earnings. Clapping for a story will also notify the author that you applauded, so it also serves a role as a notification tool.

Fans — Fans represent the number of unique readers who clapped for a specific story. In my estimation, fans are the best proxy for financial success as an author, on Medium.

In my estimation, fans are the best proxy for financial success as an author, on Medium.

Only a post’s author can see how many claps individual users gave. Readers will see only a list of people who clapped, as illustrated below:

Monthly Analytics — Medium allows writers to easily compare views, reads, and fans over the past 30 days, and across past 30 periods, prior to that:

As you can see from the image above, Medium’s dashboard chart resizes to properly graph statistics from any given month.

— Casey Botticello

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions. Be sure to sign up for the Blogging Guide newsletter, to get the latest tips, tricks, and news about writing on Medium and to join our Facebook group, Medium Writing, to share your latest Medium posts and connect with other writers.

If you liked this article, here are some other articles you may enjoy:

Casey Botticello is a partner at Black Edge Consulting. Black Edge Consulting is a strategic communications firm, specializing in online reputation management, digital marketing, and crisis management. Prior to founding Black Edge Consulting, he worked for BGR Group, a bipartisan lobbying and strategic communications firm.

Casey is the founder of the Cryptocurrency Alliance, a Super PAC dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain advocacy. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or by following his Medium publication, Blogging Guide.