Writing
Top Writer Tags Made Easy With This Comprehensive List
All top writer tags and a little bit of their history
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to my tags during my time on Medium. I apply tags that I think are appropriate to a story. Seeing a couple of stories regarding top writer tags had me wonder whether I should step up my game and use the Top Writer Tags, so I’ve done some research and compiled a table with everything I could find.
In this article, I share my data, how to interpret the data and I also share some of my observations. It is down to you to decide whether you can do something useful with it. If you want to pursue top writer status, then I suggest you read this excellent article by J.J. Pryor.
Table of currently known top writer tags
Quick remark before you jump into the table. By default, the tags are shown in alphabetical order. You can click on the headers to sort the table.
Explanation of the table
I pulled all historical information I could find on Medium into the table. There’s too much information to show it all, so I opted for a view that would be pleasing to the eye. Confused? I explain each column below.
By the way, tags have a tiny shroud of mystery around them. I refer to the tags in the table above as curated tags in the remainder of this article.
Writer slots
A maximum of 50 authors can have the Top Writer Status for a particular tag. It’s a dynamic thing. Stop publishing with a particular tag and you might lose it to someone else. Write more and chances are you’ll either gain or keep it.
The first column shows the currently available ‘slots’ that are still available for the tag. The blue bar is filled if all slots are taken. The second column shows the number of writing slots from about half a year ago.
Number of articles
After the number of writer slots, the number of articles that were posted in January 2018 and July 2021 is shown. For maximum legibility, you do need to multiple the numbers by 1000.
The blue graph shows how the number of posts evolved over time. It uses data from January 2019, June 2019, and January 2020.
Tags
This should be self-explanatory. Currently, there seem to be 74 tags you can achieve Top Writer Status in. Please let me know if you spot another one in the wild!
Category
I have put the tags in categories that make sense to me. Some are hard to categorize with just one label, so you’ll notice that some are labeled ‘Mixed’. The tag Ideas, for example, contains stories about a multitude of subjects: from business ideas to technological innovation to shower thoughts.
Some observations
Dropping numbers
Some tags have fewer writer slots than they had half a year ago. Take a look at Life, Self Driving Cars and Women in Tech. My guess is that the number of writers dropped due to some cleanup Medium has done, or authors that have become inactive in the subject and consequently lost their top writer status.
Another observation is in regard to the 2016 Election tag. The number of posts has dropped. This has probably to do with the stories bearing that tag are too old to be included for the top writer status. I’ve read an article about it, but I can’t seem to find it anymore. Please let me know in the comments if you have more information about it.
My top-writer status in Tanka means nothing
You can do a search for every tag. When you search for tanka, you’ll notice that I am currently the #5 writer in it (yesterday I was at #4, ouch!). That must mean something, right? I don’t know for sure, but I think I do benefit from it. Read my article if you’re interested in my hypothesis.
Should I use tags from the list?
As Medium does not disclose their inner workings completely, there is some mystery around the top writer tags. A lot of popular writers state that having a top writer tag from the list does not help in reaching more readers. I’ve done some analysis and reported my findings in this article.
Future updates to this data
I am not sure anyone is interested in this information. Let me know if you’re thinking of referring to this table from time to time. It’s not that hard to do some dynamic updates to the information.
Want to have a nice overview of your stories that were Chosen for Further Distribution? Use this Chrome extension!
The extension I wrote for Google Chrome has finally reached enough maturity to be released into the wild. Check which topic your story was distributed into right from your stats-page. Consider checking it out:
