Why Some Reads Don’t Matter on Medium
3 ways reads don’t count on Medium.com
In my never-ending quest to ‘make it’ on Medium, I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching what does well, how the pros became pros, and how the hell to get published.
I’ve also come across some interesting quirks of Medium while digging down into this particular rabbit hole.
Here are a few recent discoveries I’ve made on the topic of ‘reads’ for Medium articles.
3 Ways Reads Don’t Count on Medium.com
1. Publications
If you are a writer on a publication, you can view every other article in that publication for free.
For those of you that aren’t paying members of the Medium subscription plan, you’ll have an official 3-article-views per month before hitting the paywall.
Let’s say you are a writer on Feedium (and not a paying Medium subscriber).
You can then view every other article on Feedium without seeing the paywall.
A fellow Mediumite friend, Robert Turner, pointed this out to me the other day. We then proceeded to test it. I was shocked that it turned out to be true.
Perhaps it’s a form of reward for writing on the platform. I’m really not sure — yet.
2. Twitter
If you click a Medium article link in a Twitter tweet, the pay-wall doesn’t apply.
Any views that come into your article from Twitter will not be paywalled.
Don’t believe me?
Log out of your Medium account, go on my J.J. Pryor Twitter feed and try one of my other articles.
It will let you view the entirety of it without mention of a paywall (usually — a closable box is sometimes triggered but doesn’t stop you from continuing to read).
Even stranger, if you do that and click on one of the recommended stories at the bottom of those articles, you can view them as much as you want.
Some other Mediumites and I tested this extensively.
Medium does throw up occasional notices and requests for you to sign up, but they’re all closable and don’t block you from reading on.
If a viewer IS logged into their Medium account, I haven’t tested whether or not that view counts as a paid one — but I do plan on doing so in the future and updating this.
My current guess is that it depends on where you view the article after clicking the Twitter link — (ex. If it pops up in the Medium app it's treated as a regular paid view vs other options where it isn’t)
3. Friend links
If someone goes through your ‘Friend Link’, they won’t encounter a paywall
This one isn’t a recent discovery, but I still felt it belonged here as not everyone knows about it.
Once you publish an article, whether it's self-published or through another publication, you are able to return to that article and retrieve a ‘friend link’.
You can send this link to any friend or foe alike, and none of them will encounter a paywall when going through it.
It’s great for sharing your work and not having to bug your friends to sign up to a website they may or may not be interested in (outside of you of course!).
Why does this matter?
As with everything in life, there are pros and cons to the matter. On one part, having no-paywall occur in these three methods is a great way to increase viewership.
Engagement matters for ranking on the platform, and getting extra views by avoiding the paywall is a great way to boost that stat.
The bad part is, to the best of my knowledge, none of these views count towards your ‘Member Reading Time’ — the metric that composes most of Medium paychecks these days.
If none of your articles have gotten a crazy amount of views yet, this is no big deal to worry about, at all.
But if you look at your stats for articles you’ve shared all over your social media and friend groups — and have a complete lack of money earned — this might help explain why.
For those lucky few of us that have had articles go viral on Twitter — it can be a mixed blessing.
Robert Turner describes the Twitter read-effect in this succinct piece about his recent article that got 32,000 views — and didn’t earn much at all.
Of course, if the paywall was in effect, his article never would’ve gone viral in the first place!
And he’s also likely seen an increase in followers and related reads with all that attention as well.
So, overall a good thing — just something to be aware of!
Thanks for reading! Please check out my Feedium publication for lots of useful Medium on Medium hot action. Here’s a couple of the more popular examples: