My Medium Stats Are Wrong!

Summary

The author discovered discrepancies in their Medium statistics after a story got boosted, leading to incorrect reporting of views and reads for their other stories, and is seeking answers while having contacted Medium support for clarification.

Abstract

After one of their stories received a boost on Medium, the author noticed issues with the analytics for their other content. The total views and reads appeared to be dropping, with an absurd report of negative reads for one day. Manual calculations for recent days showed higher numbers than reported, contradicting the automated stats. Additionally, the read ratio seemed off, with individual story stats showing a higher ratio than the aggregate data. On February 29th, the boosted story had a high number of views and reads but generated zero revenue, which was another anomaly. The author has reached out to Medium support with their findings and is awaiting a response. They also invite readers to share if they have experienced similar issues and to speculate on possible reasons for these errors.

Opinions

The author is concerned and possibly frustrated about the inaccuracies in Medium's analytics, as it affects their ability to track the performance of their content accurately.
They are proactive in seeking a resolution, having already contacted Medium support and reaching out to the community for insights.
The author suspects that the boost given to one of their stories might be interfering with the analytics of their other stories.
There is a sense of urgency and importance placed on understanding the metrics of their articles, as evidenced by the creation of additional tracking sheets and manual calculations to cross-check the data.
The author is skeptical about the reliability of Medium's statistics, especially after discovering discrepancies in the reported revenue despite high view and read counts.

The problem:

One of my stories got boosted — nice, but I wanted to track what’s happening with all of my other stories.

So I created two more sheets in my Medium daily tracker — one for this story and one for the rest. It calculates automatically the stats for all other stories by extracting the boosted story stats from the totals.

the stats for all of my other stories except the boosted one

Only to discover that…

My Medium stats are wrong!

The total views and reads of my other stories are dropping…and for yesterday I got negative reads (total reads: 423, boosted story reads: 429) — WTF?! So I calculated manually the stats for yesterday and the day before taking some (not all!!) of my other stories and I got more views and reads! And I post every day…it cannot be dropping!

The read ratio is also dropping, but I see way much higher ratio when I check story by story…

On Feb 29th the boosted story got 217 views, 153 reads (of which 121 member reads), and ZERO revenue!

Boosted story stats for Feb — on 29th there’s no revenue but lots of views and reads!

My Medium Stats Are Wrong!

How I found out and what I did.

The problem:

My Medium stats are wrong!

What did I do?