Who are the Biggest Writers on Medium? ✨

A closer look into the writers with more than 100,000 followers on Medium.

You probably know that you can easily find out how many followers a Medium user has, just by visiting their profile page. You can even find a complete list of the followers, as well as those being followed. After seeing Tim Denning’s massive follower count, I was curious to know how many other Medium writers have more than 100,000 followers. So I visited lots and lots of profile pages to find out.

How many Medium users have more than 100,000 followers?

There are at least 89 Medium users with more than 100,000 followers. Because I did not search every user on Medium, there may even be slightly more, but I can say with certainty that there are at least 89.

Is it more than you expected? It was for me. But perhaps not so surprising if you compare with social networks like Twitter and Instagram, where follower counts go into the millions.

I’ll make some more comments about these ‘users’ below. But first here is the list, arranged in order of most followers. You can tab through the pages using the arrow in the top right.

What is a Medium ‘user’?

The first thing you will probably notice is that most of the ‘users’ on this list are organisations, rather than individual writers.

The second thing you may notice is that there is a ridiculously large number of followers for the follow-by-default account ‘Medium Staff’ (54 million). As I’m pretty certain there are nowhere near that many current users on Medium, I can only suppose that these totals include people who have joined up and then later left Medium. The number of current, paid-up members would be significantly lower.

Although it’s not evident from the data in this list, many of the users are not actively publishing content in 2021.For example, the number 1 individual writer on the list, Gary Vaynerchuk, has not published an article since December 2018.

The last name on the list is Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s right, the lovable rogue from 1993 classic film ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’! Leo’s only article on Medium was written in 2014. But he has still managed to amass 99,600 followers (I rounded it up so he made the list).

So on the bright side, neither Gary nor Leo are competing in your niche for article views. But on the down side they are also not likely to read your article, as I highly doubt they are still paying their $5 per month.

How many active Medium writers in 2021 have more than 100,000 followers?

Removing all the organisations from the list, as well as those writers who have not published any articles in 2021, we are left with a list of 21 individual writers with more than 100,000 followers each.

Below these 21 writers are represented in a scatter plot, with the vertical axis showing their follower count and the horizontal axis showing how many articles they published in 2021.

Some stars are labelled, and you can see the names and bios for any of them by hovering / tapping on the icons.

You can see Medium’s founder Ev Williams in the mid-left of the chart, with 200,000+ followers and 50 articles published in 2021 (including comments on other people’s stories which he chose to post to his profile).

Barack Obama is still active on Medium, publishing 17 articles this year. Although his follower count of 120,000 still falls short of Bernie Sanders, I expect he will catch up soon if he stays active. Keep grinding Barack!

Those stars on the right of the chart are some of the best known top writers in popular tags, such as ‘Life’, ‘Self-improvement’, ‘Business’ and ‘Writing’. You can find a more detailed analysis of the publishing habits for some of them in the article below.

Connections between Medium stars

The chart below represents the Medium stars as a network. Links between bubbles represent users who follow each other, as well as tags connected to top writers.

• Red stars are writers who have written more than 50 articles in 2021
• Pink stars are writers with 10 to 50 articles
• Blue stars are writers with less than 10 articles
• Gold circles represent the top writer tags earned by these stars

A few key points from the network diagram:

• Yes Tim Denning has a lot of top writer tags! His tally is currently sitting at 17, which include some of the most popular tags on Medium.
• Ev Williams is the most connected star, either following or being followed by most of the other writers in the network.
• Barack Obama does not officially follow anyone (although he may well have a secret alias account he uses for following Tim Denning and some others). All his links in the diagram are from other people who follow him.
• Is it surprising to anyone else that there is only one female (Julie Zhuo) in this list of stars?

If you like looking at connections, and in particular network diagrams, you might enjoy the diagrams I created to represent connections between Medium tags:

How much do the superstars earn on Medium?

This is a natural question that probably crossed your mind, together with the related question “How many followers do you need to make a full-time living on Medium?”

Sorry but I don’t have much to say about that here. I could crunch some numbers and give a rough ballpark, but I really don’t have enough data or experience with the platform. I have been on Medium for less than 3 months and made less than $100 in total. That may change after this article drops! 💸💰😉

For answers to these questions, you’re better off reading from somebody who knows more about them: