MEDIUM MYSTERIES
The Mystery of the Skyrocketing Stats
What’s Happening?? And Why?
I’ve been on Medium since February 2019, and while my daily reads sometimes fluctuate, they tend to hold steady at around 200 a day.
So imagine my surprise when I checked my stats this morning and saw that I received 3,503 reads yesterday!
This experience is known on the platform as getting “the big green finger,” because of the way the green bar for that day’s stats rises up from the surrounding day’s stats like — a big green finger.
Where on earth did all those extra reads come from??
I checked the last story I published, a lighthearted essay about walking with a cane. It seemed unlikely that would have attracted thousands of readers. And it didn’t. So far, it’s been read by 38 people.
Next, I checked my Medium Partnership Program earnings page. 3.5K reads should translate into a big fat paycheck, right?
Wrong! Yesterday I earned my usual daily take — $10.
Which means? The mystery post wasn’t getting all those reads as a result of Medium putting it into the feeds of my fellow Medium readers. That would have led to an increase in Medium Partnership readers, which would have translated into more than $10.
Instead, one of my Medium stories must have been shared or promoted by somebody off the platform yesterday, and thousands of readers off the platform read it.
That’s cool.
Of course, I still have no idea what story everyone is reading. And it hasn’t earned me a cent. And it probably won’t.
But that’s Medium.
(Update: The story got an additional 4,426 reads yesterday. I still have no idea which story it is.)
(Further Update: On 10/27/21, I finally figured out what was going on. As several readers of this post suggested, it wasn’t a story that was getting all of those views. It was a response I’d posted to another writer’s story. This response was viewed 10,000 times in 3 days!)
Writing Coach and editor-for-hire Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, can help you improve and publish your work. Drop her a line at [email protected]. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)