What Kind of Stories Make the ‘Staff Picks’ List At Medium?
Curation may be dead, but some stories still get a broader distribution.
You won’t see “Chosen for further distribution” on your Medium articles any longer. That coveted message that resulted in more eyes on your work is dead and gone.
However, there is a current list of “Staff Picks” by Medium editors which shows up on a sidebar to the right of your home page.
Do these stories get more views? What kind of article is chosen to be in this illustrious list? Let’s take a look. You can find the list here:
“Stories from across Medium, hand selected by our team”
There are 119 stories in Medium’s list at the time of this writing. They aren’t organized by date. Most are recent, however, some are from years ago. One near the top of the list is an article from 2015.
Analyzing the top 30 of these 119 stories I found the following.
1. You don’t need to be a paying member of Medium or have your story behind the paywall to get featured.
Only 14 of the 30 were “Member-only” stories from paying members of the “Medium Partner Program” (MPP).
2. You don’t need to publish in a publication to be featured.
It was actually more common to self-publish rather than be in a publication. 22 of the stories were self-published. Of the ones in publications: 3 were from Human Parts. The others were Level Up Coding, method and matter, momentum, UX Collective, and Zora.
3. You don’t need lots of followers to get chosen.
- 16 of the 30 had over 10K followers.
- 3 had between 1K and 10K.
- And the rest were all under 1K, with two stories from writers with less than 100 followers.
4. Length doesn’t seem to matter
The stories ranged from 3 minutes to 20. There didn’t seem to be any pattern.
5. Did the stories get claps?
And finally, did it pay off for the writers to be chosen by Medium staff? Did they get lots of views? We can’t see how many views and reads the stories have, so we’ll have to rate this one by the number of claps.
- 18 of the stories received over 1K claps and this ranged from 1.1K to 11.7K.
- The other 12 all had less than 1K, ranging from 48 to 996.
What does it all mean?
I think it means I was procrastinating today from doing actual work I need to get done and went down a Medium rabbit hole to avoid it. But since I’m still down here I think we can conclude that Medium staff writers are fans of self-published works, length doesn’t matter, following counts don’t matter, and neither does being a paying member.
As for topics, they varied. There were technology, self-help, social media, and personal essays. I didn’t see a meta article in the bunch. The ones I read were well-written and high-quality writing on diverse topics.
How can I get featured?
Let’s put this into perspective. I have no idea how many articles are on Medium today, but it’s a lot. I found this article from 2020, where J.J. Pryor estimated in September 2020:
- 47,000 new articles were published each day
- 1,385,000 for the month
- 16,614,000 for the year
This may be two-year-old data, but we can assume there are a lot of articles getting published here each day. And 119 of those millions of articles are currently featured by Medium for “Staff Picks.”
I’d say it’s a pretty slim chance of finding your story there.
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