Medium Writing Tips
What are Fans on Medium?
Understanding the most valuable metric for Medium writers
If you want to be a successful writer on Medium, it is critical to understand the data on your readers. Perhaps one of the most important, yet often overlooked stats is Medium’s “fans” metric.
Fans represent the number of unique readers who clapped for a story. Many writers solely focus on the total number of views, reads, or claps. However, in my experience, fans are probably the best proxy for successful content on Medium.
Views can be skewed by click bait titles or sensational topics, Reads can be misleading for articles that are extremely long (or very short), and even Medium’s Read Ratio can prove unreliable as it fails to account for true reader engagement. Comments are a good measure of engagement, but they fail to account for articles with large amounts of external traffic, as many of those users are not Medium members and cannot comment, regardless of their appreciation for any given story.
Fans are essentially a measure of unique Medium readers who took the time to clap for a story. You may wonder — why don’t claps serve as a better proxy for Medium success?
Given the structure of Medium's clap system, each reader can clap anywhere from 1–50 times. So if an article has 500 claps, this could represent as few as 10 unique readers and as many as 500.
With Medium's weighted clap system, unique and new readers are the key to making money from content published. And while it’s not a perfect proxy, fans are the closest metric to platform-specific success on Medium.
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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.
