avatarJ.J. Pryor

Summary

This article presents an analysis of the most internally linked authors on Medium, ranking them by the frequency of references within the platform to identify the most inspirational writers.

Abstract

The author conducted a study to determine which writers on Medium are most referenced by their peers, as a proxy for their inspirational impact. Using a combination of Medium's own tools and external SEO software, the author ranked 107 authors based on the number of internal links they receive. The study also categorized authors by common writing themes, such as life, self, and business, to provide insight into the prevalent topics within the Medium community. The findings reveal a variety of authors with follower counts ranging from 300 to over 200,000, and highlight some potentially manipulative accounts that are highly referenced yet have low engagement. The article concludes with a call to action for Medium to clean up such accounts and provides a list of the most impactful writers, including their follower numbers and main writing categories.

Opinions

  • The author acknowledges the subjective nature of quantifying inspiration but chose to use the number of references as an objective measure.
  • The study suggests that the number of followers does not necessarily correlate with the level of

Who Are the Most Inspirational Authors on Medium? (Statistically)

An analysis of the 107 most internally linked authors on Medium.com

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Have you ever wondered which writers inspire other writers the most? That was my mission today, and here are the results!

I measured the number of times an author is referenced or linked to within Medium itself. I then ranked them from the highest to lowest.

Now when I say inspiring, this is obviously a very subjective term. Trying to quantify inspiration is a pretty difficult task.

But I had to choose one word, so I went with inspiration. Other ways to look at these results could be:

  • Usefulness of material
  • Shareability
  • Likeability

Either way, these results are quite interesting to me — and maybe to you too!

In the below list, I included the author's name, the number of followers, what categories they write in — and what rank they are in terms of being referenced on the platform.

How I sorted the data

I used a combination of tools in the Medium platform itself as well as a 3rd party SEO tool to do this.

For each author on the list, I used related popular tags for that author to state what they write about.

I also had to group together several categories to keep things simpler:

  • ex. Life and life lessons
  • Self and self-improvement
  • Family and relationships
  • Business and marketing
  • Programming and web development
  • etc etc

I’m not saying these categories are the same, but I had to reduce the amount of data in order to make it presentable.

Now that you know how I researched it, let’s take a look at the data!

Interesting findings from the Medium data

Firstly, I found several accounts that are likely manipulated in terms of page visits and references.

These accounts all had:

  • Very low claps on articles
  • Very high amount of references (which conflicts with the first point)
  • Often were pushing cryptocurrencies
  • Sometimes in another language

I hid the usernames of the accounts in case I’m wrong as I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone.

But nevertheless, it may be time for Medium to do some cleanups — as these are the most linked accounts on the site!

The list is also full of a variety of follower sizes :

  • From as little as 300 followers for new (but highly impactful) Abhinav Chandoli, all the way to 247,000 following Benjamin Hardy, PhD! (More than the founder of Medium.com himself!)

Most common writing categories on Medium:

Many of you that are familiar with the Medium community can probably already guess what some of the most common categories are for these inspirational writers.

Here’s the number of authors that write about each category (Out of 100):

  • Life — 42
  • Self — 40
  • Writing — 28
  • Relationships — 16
  • Business — 14
  • Entrepreneurship — 11
  • Technology — 9
  • Mental Health — 9
  • Productivity — 8
  • Humor — 7
  • Poetry — 7
  • Psychology — 7
  • Culture — 7
  • Cryptocurrency — 6
  • Health — 6
  • Science — 6
  • Programming — 5
  • Finance — 5
  • History — 5
  • Women — 5
  • Politics — 4
  • Art — 4
  • Fatherhood — 2
  • Environment — 2
  • Men — 1
  • Crime — 1
  • Sports — 1

The 107 most impactful writers on Medium

  1. Damon Beres — 4.8k— Technology, Finance
  2. Marvin Marcano — 3.7k— Self, Life, Business
  3. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  4. Ayodeji Awosika — 74k— Self, Life, Mental Health
  5. Ashley Broadwater — 0.8k— Self, Mental Health, Relationships
  6. Ev Williams — 213k— Owner of Medium
  7. Doug Stevenson — 2.9k— Programming
  8. Yakko Majuri — 0.9k— Cryptocurrency, Programming
  9. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  10. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  11. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  12. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  13. Ryan Fan — 5.6k— Life, Writing, Humor
  14. Niklas Göke — 75k?— Self, Life, Writing
  15. Tim Denning — 122k— Writing, Self, Entrepreneurship
  16. The Good Men Project — 55k— Fatherhood, Men, Relationships
  17. Shannon Ashley — 30k— Self, Life, Writing
  18. Faisal Khan — 4.6k— Finance, Cryptocurrency, Economics
  19. Andrei Tapalaga ✒️ — 6.9k — History, Life, Culture
  20. Matt Lillywhite — 14k— Life, Self, Relationships
  21. Jessica Lynn — 5.1k— Writing, Life, Entrepreneurship
  22. Kyrie Gray — 7.4k— Humor, Culture, Relationships
  23. Brandon Anderson — 6.6k— Sports, Culture, Humor
  24. Felicia C. Sullivan — 27k— Writing, Life, Mental Health
  25. Brian Rowe — 6.8k — Writing, Self, Entrepreneurship
  26. Edward Anderson — 1.7k— Crime, History
  27. Sinem Günel — 17.2k— Self, Life, Business
  28. Sergey Faldin — 5.8k— Self, Life, Creativity
  29. Jack Heimbigner — 4.2k— Health, Life, Productivity
  30. Danny Forest — 23k— Self, Life, Productivity
  31. Darius Foroux — 174k— Productivity, Self, Life
  32. Abhinav Chandoli — 0.3k— Technology
  33. Daniel Ganninger — 2k— History, Science, Business
  34. Thomas Oppong — 194k— Productivity, Self, Mental Health
  35. Dave Smurthwaite — 1.4k— Travel, Life, Health
  36. Yael Wolfe — 4.8k— Relationships, Women, Love
  37. George J. Ziogas — 10k— Self, Life, Psychology
  38. Jordan Gross — 8.8k— Self, Life, Leadership
  39. Trevor Mahoney — 1.2k— Ideas, Technology, Science
  40. Jonathan Greene — 2.2k— Poetry, Self, Life
  41. James Finn — 6.1k — LGBTQ, Love
  42. Rebeca Ansar — 3.5k— Poetry, Women, Love
  43. Lisa Martens — 2.6k— Mental Health, Fiction, Humor
  44. Linda Caroll — 8.8k— Life, Women, Writing
  45. Brianna Wiest — 77k— Self, Life, Psychology
  46. Karen Nimmo — 13.9k— Psychology, Mental Health, Self
  47. Shaunta Grimes — 33k— Writing, Creativity, Productivity
  48. Sylvain Saurel — 7k— Finance, Cryptocurrency, Self
  49. Tom Kuegler — 46k— Life, Writing, Entrepreneurship
  50. Lucien Lecarme — 3.1k— Self, Cryptocurrency, Life
  51. Anna Rozwadowska — 2.2k— Poetry, Self, Life
  52. Joe Garza — 0.7k— Humor, Culture, Writing
  53. Ben Le Fort — 5.5k — Life, Finance, Writing
  54. Joseph Serwach — 2.3k — Religion, Politics, Culture
  55. Shin Jie Yong — 2.6k— Health, Science, Life
  56. Paul Myers MBA — 2.1k— Business, Leadership, Self
  57. Toni Koraza — 3.5k— Entrepreneurship, Writing, Life
  58. Terry Barr — 1.2k— Relationships, Writing, Food
  59. Desiree Driesenaar — 3.1k— Writing, Environment
  60. guérin — 2.1k— Poetry, Love, Art
  61. Laura Fox — 1.5k— Mental Health, Self, Relationships
  62. Emma Austin — 13.2k— Love, Relationships, Life
  63. Nick Wignall — 55k — Mental Health, Psychology, Self
  64. Concoda — 10k— Business, Finance, Self
  65. Barry Davret — 30k— Self, Psychology, Writing
  66. Christine Stevens — 5.3k — Humor, Love, Relationships
  67. Alex Roan — 0.7k— Cryptocurrency, Programming
  68. Darryl Brooks — 1.6k— Writing, Self, Life
  69. Jonathan Hsu — 4.5k— Programming, Technology, Business
  70. Joe Duncan — 9.9k— Relationships, Poetry, Self
  71. Geraint Clarke — 1.7k— Business, Leadership, Life
  72. Joanna Henderson — 1.2k— Self, Business, Relationships
  73. Jim Woods — 4.4k— Writing, Creativity, Self
  74. Megan Holstein — 14.8k— Productivity, Self, Life
  75. Jørgen Veisdal — 4.4k— Science, Math, History
  76. Christopher Laine — 0.9k— Programming, Philosophy, Art
  77. Jared M. Spool — 50k — UX, Design
  78. Vlad Alex (Merzmensch) — 1.4k— Technology, Art
  79. Account Deleted
  80. Zach J. Payne — 5.2k — Life, Poetry, Writing
  81. Dan Hill — 19.3k— Life, Business, Politics
  82. Bridget Webber — 4k— Love, Poetry, Psychology
  83. Adam Skali — 2k— Productivity, Self, Writing
  84. Shain E. Thomas, M.Sc. — 1.6k— Movies, TV
  85. Tracy Gerhardt-Cooper — 2.2k— Self, Religion, Life
  86. Benjamin Hardy, PhD — 247k— Writing, Self, Life
  87. Emily Mullin — 7k— Health, Science
  88. Cynthia Marinakos — 4.8k— Writing, Creativity, Productivity
  89. Todd Brison — 63k— Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Life
  90. Erik Brown — 2.5k— History, Life, Self
  91. Aaron Schnoor — 1.4k— Business, Technology, Entrepreneurship
  92. Dawn Bevier — 2.1k— Self, Writing, Relationships
  93. Oliver Lindberg — 4.5k— UX, Design, Entrepreneurship
  94. Michael Barnard — 2.2k— Science, Politics, Environment
  95. Tracey Folly — 8.9k— Relationships, Love, Culture
  96. Richard Liu — 1.2k— China, Technology, Business
  97. August Birch — 8.6k— Writing, Self, Life
  98. Kristen Pizzo — 1.1k— LGBTQ, Love, Mental Health
  99. Haje Jan Kamps — 4.4k— Business, Entrepreneurship, Technology
  100. Account Hidden — Suspicious
  101. Alex Tucker — 0.4k— Writing, Business, Self
  102. Steve Glaveski — 3.1k— Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Life
  103. Noah Levy — 0.7k— Art, Culture, Politics
  104. Stowe Boyd — 13.3k— Business, Leadership
  105. Kathrine Meraki — 2.8k— Life, Relationships, Psychology
  106. Benny Lim — 1.6k— Life, Writing, Health
  107. Gillian Sisley — 8.3k— Writing, Women, Relationships

Wrapup

As always, thanks for reading! I hope you were able to get a bit of a grasp of who’s often referenced on Medium itself by other writers.

Perhaps you were lucky enough to find some new authors to enjoy and learn from as well!

And just in case you’re wondering, apparently I come in around 155th currently. Not bad!

Keep up with my guides, rants, deep dives, and crazy shenanigans with my free newsletter. Thanks and have a great day!

J.J. Pryor

Medium
Writing
Writing Tips
Advice
Ideas
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