Medium Writing Tips / Medium Tools
The New Medium Story Stats Page
Examining the new Medium data analytics tools, which include member reading time and daily earnings reports
The wait is over and Medium has transitioned to its new earnings calculation, which is no longer based on claps but on Member Reading Time.
This article provides a good summary of the changes to Medium’s earnings methodology, including several useful graphics:
Medium also has now implemented their redesigned story stats page, which shows both your story’s daily total member reading time and its daily earnings.
There are many familiar metrics still utilized in the main stats portion of the dashboard (Views, Reads, Read Ratio, and Fans):
However, when you click on the details button, for any article, you are presented with several new metrics and charts analyzing a specific Medium story’s performance.
Lifetime Summary
Lifetime Summary is a series of cumulative stats about a specific Medium story.
While the first metric (Views) is the same as it was in the previous dashboard, the other two metrics are different or new.
Earnings is a total of how much money your story has earned since it was published. While this was also available in the old dashboard this figure now includes current earnings from the daily pay periods (including earnings that have not been paid out yet).
Average Reading Time is the average amount of time readers spent actively reading your story. This is an entirely new statistic, obviously meant to help writers better understand how long readers actually spend on their articles.
Your Story’s Impact
Below the Lifetime Summary is a section called Your Story’s Impact. This section contains data on a Medium story over a selected month.
Views
Views monitors the traffic of your article. There is both a total view of the selected month (as seen in the red boxes) and a breakdown of what percent of your traffic is from internal views and what percent is from external views.
Earnings
Earnings is a snapshot of your past earnings and estimate of unpaid earnings. While earnings are updated daily, it’s worth noting that there appears to be at least a day lag in reporting.
Member Reading Time
Member reading time is the total amount of time that Medium members spent reading your article. This statistic is by far the most useful in tracking earnings.
Daily Medium Article Stats
Perhaps the best change to the Medium story stats dashboard is the ability to views all of these metrics at once. Mouse over the chart and you can see the aggregate statistics for a specific article by day:
Takeaways:
- Utilize Member reading time as a barometer for earnings success.
- Take advantage of the new dashboard to track activity day-by-day and look for unique traffic patterns.
- If you are a writer who published stories before the earnings change was implemented (October 28th), you can determine if the new system is beneficial to your style of writing by comparing the daily earnings before and after October 28th. By examining how similar amounts of reads resulted in differing earnings, patterns emerge about whether your story (assuming it was not published recently) fared better under claps or the new member reading time.
Regardless of the which system your work did better under, the new Medium writer compensation system is here to stay (at least for the foreseeable future).
Claps still matter if they are the primary tool driving your article traffic. But generally, claps no longer directly impact earnings. It is probably best for writers to ensure that they produce high quality and engaging content.
In other words, while the metrics and data points have changed, the strategy of putting forth your best writing, formatting your article properly, and focusing on marketing your content, still apply.
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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.