4 Medium Top 10 Lists You Should Know
Top articles, authors, tags, and publications based on data analysis
I have known about Medium since 2015. If I needed some sources to read technology articles, I found them on Medium. It has almost everything I need: technology news, knowledge, tutorials, predictions, comments, etc. About four months ago, I suddenly had the idea of becoming a writer on Medium. I’ve gotten quite a lot from it, and now it’s time to pay back.
I wrote my first article three months ago. In the first month, my stories got only minimal views and zero claps. The sad thing is, a lot of writers on Medium get the same. How do I know this? Read the full story for the answer.
We writers always face issues after publishing a few posts: why do my articles get so few views? People likely don’t care about it, nobody claps, or I don’t know which subjects to write about. What do people often read about the most on Medium? I also read some advice from other authors like 5 Tips to Maximize Your Medium Views, 20 Lessons From Making $20,050 as a Writer in 30 Days, How To Make $5,000 From a Single Blog Post.
Most of the advice is the same: you need to write a clickable title, publish through popular collections, read articles from top authors to learn, etc. But they just say it, they didn’t give any numbers to prove it. Top collections: what are they? How many followers do they have? Top authors: who are they? How many followers do they have? How many views do they earn per article? What topics do people pay attention to?
I couldn’t find an easy answer, so I dug for it myself. I crawled through nearly two million posts on Medium from 2019 to compile the statistics below.
1. Top Ten Publications
Top collections of all time: Matter is at the top with 1,036,494 followers, but it seems that this collection is not producing anymore. I haven’t seen any posts since 2017. The same for freecodecamp.org — they moved out. Number three is The Startup, the publication which I write for.
One piece of advice I hear the most on Medium: publish through a publication. If you begin with 0 followers on Medium, it’s tough for you and your stories to reach users. Publishing through a publication would help. Basically, the more followers a publication has, the more readers you will have access to if you publish your article through it. So check the list above carefully and then pick a publication.
- Seven out of ten publications are related to technology.
- Publications publish an average of 1,395,3370 articles a day.
- The Startup published the most stories (24,241) and gets the most claps (3,832,591 in 2019).
2. Top Ten Posts That Got the Most Claps
1- No thank you, Mr. Pecker [Jeff Bezos]
2- Is San Francisco becoming a third world city? [Dan Clinciu]
3- FLAMEHYRE TOKEN? A BRIEF INTRODUCTION [Hyre Token]
4- On Fluid Democracy: A Dynamic Shape to the Future [DeLeon Hickman]
5- Why accommodation is so costly on centralized services [Ezystayz]
6- Hello Newly Minted BlockStampers! Here’s How To Multiply Your Bounty on BlockStamp Games [BlockStamp]
7- Discoin, the tailor-made cryptocurrency for online shopping and selling 🚀 [Discodery]
8- YouTube Update: P-Rep candidates Intro Video Releases [kim]
9- BURNT : A Hyper-deflationary Cryptocurrency [Deflationary Token]
10- Zoom Zero Day: 4+ Million Webcams & maybe an RCE? Just get them to visit your website! [Jonathan Leitschuh]
Number one: “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” by Jeff Bezos. I didn’t think Amazon’s boss would write an article on Medium. In this post, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused The National Enquirer of attempting to blackmail him by threatening to publish 10 intimate photos unless Bezos stopped an investigation into how the tabloid obtained his private messages and images.
- Half of all articles were not published through any collections, and just a single article in the Top Ten was eligible to earn ad revenue from Medium.
- 70% of posts were about blockchain/bitcoin.
- Articles on Medium received an average of 62 claps.
- Of the 1,853,000 stories analyzed, only the top 1% of most-clapped stories received more than 900 claps.
- Writing a story in the top 1% is no small feat. Among the 488,000 authors, only 3% had written an article with more than 900 claps. So if you haven’t written any 900-clap posts, it’s okay. But if you have written one, congratulations! You are a top author on Medium!
3. Top Ten Authors With the Most Followers
- As you can see, the number of followers for the top author is not much different from the others, and all of them were enrolled in the Medium writer program.
- The oldest account was created in 2012, and the most recent was in 2016. It took eight years to get 30,000 followers. So writers, please be patient.
- A user who wrote an article on Medium receives an average of 236 claps.
- Something interesting to note: all users in the top ten most-followed are not in the top ten for users who receive the most claps.
Top ten users with the most followers in 2019:
Jeff Bezos again. He wrote one story then become the top author of the year. And, one interesting thing: he joined the Medium Partner Program, like the other nine authors.
4. Top Ten Tags With the Most Posts
The tag “Poetry” is the leader, which has 75,929 articles tagged. Look further down the list and we see some familiar topics: blockchain, bitcoin, cryptocurrency. It seems that the popularity of these keywords has not decreased from 2017–2018.
Conclusion
Hopefully, after reading my article, you’ve gotten an overview of Medium, collections, stories, and authors. If you start with about a dozen posts and only get around 100 claps, don’t worry about it. Top authors on Medium earned only 900 claps during 2019.
If you still don’t know where to begin, think about blockchain, bitcoin, or cryptocurrency. Many people wrote about them throughout 2019. Read articles by Speaker Pelosi, Alexis C. Madrigal, or Pablo Stanley. They are all top authors on Medium.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Take your first step.