This is Who Your Medium Readers Are?
What is their behavior, and what are the most read publications and more insights
If you’re not a Medium member, you can still read this story here.
Ever wondered what is the profile of your readers on Medium? What are their interests or demographics? What other sites do they visit?
And what social media do they use?
I was curious.
So I did research in Semrush — it’s a tool that helps analyze in debt the traffic of any website.
And I found some intriguing facts about the visitors, the audience, and the most visited publications!
Let’s dive in!
Total Traffic Monthly
Close to 254 million visits per month in Jan’23 and 132 million unique visitors. That’s huge!
Compared to Substack it’s more than double! Substack had 126 million visits with 50 million unique visitors.
The average visit duration on Medium is 10:42 minutes with an average of 1.27 pages per visit. This means that we have about 8.2 minutes per page. If you’re wondering what’s the average reading time, this could be a benchmark. Just keep in mind that this includes writing as well.
A curious fact is that 55.23% of the visits come from Google alone. We all know, that Medium has impressive SEO, but that’s more than a half! I was impressed!
Key Takeaway: You could definitely use Google Trends for ideas for writing on Medium.
How Many are the Writers?
That’s hard to tell…
But I looked at the most visited pages and subfolders and I noticed something…
About 546k unique visitors in January’24 have started to write a new story, with an amazing average visit duration of 6:38 minutes! Probably just drafting a few lines, but still…that’s quite a short time for writing ;)
Anyway.
Half a million writers. That’s the important thing. Is it accurate? Maybe…
Maybe there are a lot of others who simply don’t start a new story. Maybe those are the frequent writers, the ones that take it seriously. The ones that make serious money. And if so…then look at how many check the stats:
So we’re down to 169k writers who take this as a serious business. Because what kind of business this is if you don’t check your stats at least once a month, right?!
Ok, What About the Subscribers?
Assuming you need to sign in in order to read behind the paywall stories, then the revenue of about 892k subscribers is distributed among about 169k writers.
Probably…
Still, there might be enough users who sign in and do not have a paid subscription.
Now Let’s Take a Look at the Audience
Another curious thing is that most of the visitors are pretty young. So maybe one of the reasons for visiting Medium is to learn.
The most visited social media is YouTube (84,62%), and based on the category of websites visited these are the
TOP Interests:
- Mass Media
- Online Services
- Publishing
- Newspapers
- Computer Software & Development
Most Visited Social Media:
- YouTube
Most Visited Websites:
- stackoverflow.com
- github.com
- quora.com
- stackexchange.com
- linkedin.com
Key Takeaway: Writing about topics in the areas of interest might be a good niche. Sharing your articles on YouTube (as a comment to a popular video on the same topic or niche) and Facebook, and also writing on Quora. Consider making videos out of your articles: I use Pictory AI to easily transform an article into video — it has no free account, but has 2 week free trial to test everything.
Most Visited Publications
Now that’s interesting! I took a sneak peek at the most visited subfolders — those are the publications, which don’t use their own domain.
Here they are ordered by visits:
- Illumination — 2.2 million visits
- The Startup — 1,9 million visits
- The Authority Magazine — 1,2 million visits
- Geek Culture — 1,2 million visits
- javarevisited — 925k visits
Key Takeaway: If you’re a new writer, and the topics of these publications resonate with you, then submit your writing there. You will get more traction faster.
The Bottom Line
Do your research before investing too much time in writing. Know what you’re doing. Define your direction. Verify your assumptions with data.
Don’t rely only on free data. I use a paid account of Semrush, but it’s worth it! These insights provide valuable guidance about how to approach your writing.
By the way, let me know if you’d like to have such kind of analysis every month or if you’d like to see some additional data — please leave a comment down below.
Thanks for reading!
Yana
P.S. I am sharing everything about my journey on Medium, so if you enjoyed, or want to track my progress and learn more, follow me.
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