My 3 Medium Articles Went Viral, and All of Them Were Published by the Same Publication

Which pub was it? I need to thank it for my success.

I’ve been writing on Medium for over a year. I discovered it in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, and not only was it helpful in distracting me from negative thoughts, but it also became a source of my secondary income.

I do my best to be transparent with my successes, failures, and I gladly disclose how much money I earned on Medium so far. I’m also happy to share any Medium tricks I discovered. Today, I would like to tell you about my most recent discovery: the publication that hosts all my viral articles.

I produced and published around 200 articles on this platform, and most of them were curated — apart from Medium-related articles and poems. I don’t think your work has to be curated to go viral, but it certainly helps. All my viral stories were curated, and I’m unsure if they would receive any traction otherwise.

Let’s look at the statistics for my viral articles.

Viral Article Number One

Date Posted: June 2020

Length: 8 minutes.

Topics: Relationships, Love.

Tags: Love, Relationships, Psychology, Dating, Dating Advice.

Number of views: 23k.

Number of reads: 12.8k

Hours of reading time: 332 hours, 5 mins.

Money earned: $937.95 USD

Many people say you should write because you love to, and you never know which one of your articles may go viral. This turned out to be true for me, because I didn’t even want to finish the article above, and the plan was to discard it. I only published it because I didn’t want 2 hours of my life to go to waste.

“Screw it, I’ll just publish it, — I thought as I submitted the story to the new pub I was accepted into. — I can always delete it in the future.”

The next thing I know, after not getting much attention for a few days, this article got 1.2k views. My jaw dropped, as none of my work got more than a few hundred views a day! I was even more shocked when the views climbed to the 4k mark the next week!

June 2020 was the month I came to a realization it’s possible to be successful on Medium. But most importantly, it became clear to me that I can write, keep going, learn about this craft, and gain new skills. Going viral gave me hope.

Viral Article Number Two

Date Posted: May 2021

Length: 4 minutes.

Topic: Dating, Relationships, Love.

Tags: Dating, Online Dating, Relationships, Love, TInder.

Number of views: 13.5k

Number of reads: 8.6k

Hours of reading time: 196 hours, 39 mins.

Money earned: $476.53 USD

A friend of mine told me a silly story about her recent experience on Tinder. It wasn’t a particularly hilarious story, nor was it a super useful one. But I found it funny, so I decided to write about it.

“It’s nothing special, — I thought to myself. — But I’m sure I will make a few people smile. This article will probably get 300 views, that’s it. But I’ll take it. I enjoyed writing about this silly story.”

I posted the article and forgot about it. When I checked it in a few days, the stats left me astonished: the stupid Tinder story went viral! How? Why? Why wouldn’t my “smart” viral articles get so many views?

I wrote about the airline industry during covid. I shared the amazing 3D-printed home trend. I spent a week writing a very helpful 13-step guide about dealing with collections agents. Not to mention, I recently invested two whole weeks pouring my soul into a story about losing my best friend to domestic abuse! And after all that, which article gets a viral following? The one about swiping on Tinder!!!

I cannot describe how surprised I was. This made me feel both happy and upset, amazed and appalled at the same time. Was I glad to see a story of mine going viral? Of course. But did I wish a different one would be in place of the Tinder article? One hundred percent. But many of us want to see our writing succeed with every fibre of our being, and we can’t choose which one it would be. As far as I’m concerned, beggars can’t be choosers.

Viral Article Number Three

Date Posted: June 2021

Length: 6 mins.

Topic: Dating, Love, Relationships.

Tags: Love, Dating, Self, Relationships, Feminism.

Number of views: 25k

Number of reads: 10.1k

Hours of reading time: 471 hours, 46 mins

Money earned: $811.14 USD

Yes, I had two viral articles back to back: one was written in May this year, and another one was published in June 2021. I didn’t plan it this way; it just happened. However, this is the only time I have an explanation of why the story got attention.

I shared views on a very controversial topic, and my opinion was an unpopular one, to say the least. If you read the comment section, you’ll find a lot of people who disagree with me. And that’s totally fine; I accept criticism! To be honest, I didn’t get a chance you reply to all the comments because there were so many of them.

Out of all my articles, this is the one that saw the highest spike of 16.1k views in one day. And it dropped quite rapidly as well, which makes sense — I didn’t expect it to trend for a long time.

The title certainly attracted a lot of attention in this case. I didn’t word it this way on purpose, but it’s obvious that “the ultimate question” title would get people to click on it, especially when the author wrote about relationships. Did I bait people into clicking? I don’t think so. The Medium curators probably didn’t think the title was clickbait-y either since they curated my article.

There was it. 3 articles, out of 200 or so, went viral. It’s a pretty low success of 0.015%. But considering I’m still in the learning stage of my amateur writing career, I’m quite happy with the results. I didn’t expect any of my work to go viral, so looking at statistics made me happy and inspired for sure.

What’s the Publication?

The main lesson I learned from this experience is that it doesn’t matter which publication you publish your story in. Heart Affairs, the publication where all of my articles were posted, only had around 800 followers when my first article got published there. As my view count spiked, it had around 1,600 people. Right now, after a year since I joined the pub, they have 3,800 followers. It’s quite a few, but not a lot.

I got featured in dozens of publications, including StartItUp, Better Marketing and many others. As of today, I haven’t had any viral articles in any other pubs but Heart Affairs. What does it mean? It means you should look for the best fit for your article, not seeking to get added to the top Medium publications.

Conclusion

Writing is enjoyable. We write because we love it; there is no other way to put it. However, we want to be successful and even turn this hobby or side hustle into ab actual career. I cannot speak for everyone, but this is how I feel.

I would love to build a writing business and quit my day job 3 to 5 years from now. Am I money-motivated? In a way, I am, and I’m not sorry about it. Writing for yourself is amazing, but it’s even better to be paid for your work. The idea of the starving artist doesn’t appeal to me even a little bit.

Medium is the gateway to my financial future and stability. There are other factors involved in my long-term success and finance goals, but Medium is certainly on the list.

Maybe one day, I will figure out the formula for getting viral. For now, I shared the publication, which made 3 of my articles go viral.