The Problem With The 100 Followers Challenge

You may be looking at followers all wrong

I just decided to start writing here on Medium about a week ago. Seeing the fact you couldn’t monetize your articles until you have at least 100 followers was disheartening. I was never the popular kid in school. How was I ever going to convince anyone to follow me when it took me over a month to convince my cat to do it after I saved him from the scary shelter?

Then I discovered the 100 Followers Challenge. I was not alone in wondering how to reach this magic number so you could make money on your articles. Follow for follow is hardly a new concept in anything that could remotely be described as ‘social media’. I was never much of a fan of it because it did feel like trying to stuff the ballot box to become Class President in high school. In this particular situation on Medium though, I didn’t see the race to get to the 100 followers needed to join the Medium Partner Program as being attention seeking or faking popularity.

I see it as Medium just moving the goalposts and turning 100 followers into what previously was 0 followers.

There are plenty of writers who take issue with the reciprocal follow concept. I suspect 99.9% of them have over 100 followers. I also suspect a fair number of them are making the same assumption:

Followers = fans = devoted readers

Sorry to disappoint, but this is simply not true on any social media platform. Many of us may consider ourselves a fan of a performer, but it certainly doesn’t mean we buy/watch/listen to every creative endeavor they are involved in. We may like a song a lot, yet have no idea who sings it or even the name of the song. I am sure I am not alone when I say I read articles in both print and online that I enjoyed reading…yet couldn’t name the author.

Speaking of magazines, you may wonder why well known magazines would give annual subscriptions out for free. Simple — they want to increase their subscription numbers so they can make more money from advertisers. Is that really far off from soliciting followers to make money on Medium?

I use Twitter sporadically. It never fails that when I spend some time on it, I get at least one follow request. Usually these are obvious attempts to solicit a follow back without asking. Do I follow them? No. Do I block them from following me? No. It may break some hearts on Twitter, but I do not backread every tweet someone I follow made since I last logged on. Nor do I expect anyone following me to do either. I am not naïve. My Twitter followers may include bots for all I know. Someone who follows hundreds of users on Twitter may miss that awesome tweet of mine. Do I honestly think that all those fancy blue checkmark types that follow me are such devoted fans of the Twitter ramblings I made at the time to seek all my tweets out?

Only a small percent of your followers are likely to be the ones who excitedly read your latest article the second they get a notification one has been posted. Some may have just been on a follow fest, following every recommendation Medium made at them. The more authors and publications they follow, the more likely the amount of time they spend reading your work reduces. At the same time, there may be people who read your articles but don’t follow you. Totally understandable if you write on multiple topics and a reader prefers to read off of publications or tags vs follow authors. This I believe is especially if they are just readers on Medium.

So don’t worry about follower counts. Accept that now, 100 is the former 0 number of followers on Medium. Understand that follower counts is a generally useless stat like possession percentage in sports. At the end of the day, it’s not the number of followers you likely care about as much as the number of subscribers reading your articles.