Blogging Metrics

The One Metric We Don’t Talk About Enough On Medium

How you keep score defines the game you are playing

There is a glaring omission in discussions about metrics on Medium.

I am not a prolific blogger. In fact, this is my first meta post about Medium, and I don’t plan to make it a habit. A quick scan of my profile will indicate that I am not in a position to offer much advice.

But, I have done enough to credibly ask a few good questions.

It’s what I do for a living — ask good “dumb” questions.

• Why does this matter and why not that?
• What are we missing?

I follow lots of great writers and content experts on Medium.

I call them my Medium heroes. People like Kristina God, Eve Arnold, Abena Talks, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, Linda Caroll, Tim Denning, Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi, Ayodeji Awosika, Justiss Goode, and Robert Ralph publish hundreds of helpful posts about how to produce good content and maximize the Medium platform.

The one thing I don’t hear my Medium heroes talk about — the number of posts earning anything at all each month — as a metric we should be tracking.

I understand the value of engagement metrics like claps and comments. I understand the principle of posting consistently, be it daily, weekly, bi-weekly or seasonal. All the heroes talk about these things.

But, those of us in the Medium Partners Program should also examine how many posts are earning anything at all each month.

And, not just for the purpose of making money. Surely, the total amount of earnings may be important for people seeking to make a living or just really good side hustle money.

I am neither of those.

I’m not talking about the total earnings per month- that’s irrelevant to the point I am making here.

3 Great Reasons to Track the Number of Posts Earning Anything At All

There are three good reasons for tracking the total number of posts that are earning anything at all on Medium.

1. Audience Interest. The number of active, earning posts is a great lagging indicator of what peaks your readers most. While an imperfect metric, the number of posts that earn a minimum of $.01 is a good indication of Medium’s community of reader interest in your writing. More importantly, it will reveal the intensity of their interests in your various posts — presumably, more money, more interest — though that is not always true. Finding a trend line over a number of months can be revealing and inform your writing strategy in the future.

2. Medium Algorithm. If anyone tells you they know exactly how the Medium algorithm works, be skeptical. There simply are not that many people walking around with the company’s secret sauce.

However, there are many experts — including those heroes I listed above — who have cracked the code of success. They understand one key truth — the algorithm favors consistent action. Posting and commenting often in the Medium content universe has a persistent, positive effect on your old posts.

For instance, I had my first thousand-plus view post in February 2023. I wrote a short article about LeBron James on the fly, just doing my happy blog hobby, and then BOOM it took off!

To give you some context, my highest-performing article garnered 757 views last year. All of a sudden, the LeBron article had 7,300 views within a week. But, less than 1% of the views were from Medium members, i.e., they were all external views from non-Medium members. I made a total of $4.40. If that post would have had even 10% of its views among Medium readers — jeesh, I don’t even know what that payout would have looked like.

But, here is the bigger insight: this post was actively engaged for two months. It hasn’t earned anything in the months of April and May, although the NBA playoffs have now begun and LeBron James will be highly visible in the news until the season ends in mid-June.

That’s because no one is reading or engaging that post anymore.

In the meantime, I have a few other posts that continued to be engaged by Medium readers for the past six months. Six straight months of $.01 — $.05 per month from a handful of posts.

That excites me.

Not because I can now pay for a hiccup of gasoline at the pump with those pennies. But, it reveals the third and most important insight of tracking the number of posts that earn anything at all — story endurance.

Don’t try to hack the system. That would be like trying to game the stock market. The evidence of your success won’t be in one-hit wonders. It will be in the steady, constant evidence of engagement across the entire library of your stories.

Make the algorithm reveal itself to you.

3. Story endurance. Some of our stories have legs and just keep running whether we promote them or not. That’s the value of good content, but it’s also the value of good headlines, good tagging, good SEO optimization, and some good luck.

Maybe your stories have been added to several people’s saved lists, maybe they became referenceable material for a small group of experts that return to it often, or maybe you have a large personal network or strong personal brand.

Here is the thing about tracking the total number of stories earning anything at all month after month — at some point all the variables, including dumb luck, start to balance out.

As your total number of stories grows, the law of averages kicks in. Maybe a headline wasn’t favored by the algorithm enough to reward you for a story that you might consider one of your best pieces. And, another story lands in a publication that helped an otherwise weak post take off and do well.

Then, you write a post about goldfish and an international goldfish crisis takes place and your post was the right one at the right time, i.e., a LeBron moment.

It all balances out. What you are left with is a total body of work and evidence of its performance. And, that evidence should not be based on monthly total dollars, followers, or commenters.

Instead, we should look at the total number of posts earning anything. And, we can take it a step further by evaluating the percentage of your posts earning anything at all.

For small bloggers like me with under a few hundred posts, the total percentage is still relevant. For mega bloggers with thousands of posts, you might consider the total percentage of your posts published within the past 6 months or a year.

It stands to reason that major bloggers have dozens and dozens of posts earning anything at all.

Conclusion

Content production and blogging are not new. But, how we keep score affects how we think about the game we are playing. Just ask LeBron James.

My goal is to have 20 posts per month earning anything at all — I’m already close to achieving it. It will be an exciting goal to reach and when I do, I will set another goal.

Writing is supposed to be fun, you should keep finding ways to keep it interesting.

Happy writing!

Honestly,

Ed.

I am a poet, essayist, and civic strategist based in Birmingham, Alabama. Get to know me better here.