What You Didn’t Know About Your Medium Stats
I’m sorry to break your heart, but you may not be doing as well as you think! You need to understand your stats better!
Are you checking your stats 2 million times a day? You don’t miss a single clap, comment or a follower?
Welcome to the club! We are a huge majority! We are the stats nerds!
And many of us are reading our stats wrong. I certainly was!
Wait, I’ll explain!
Caution: This might break your heart! If you don’t like truth very much, stop now and scroll to something else. I recommend my third month report (as it’ll make me richer), but of course, you can choose other things on your feed.
You have been warned, proceed with caution!
Some basics first:
Views: It shows how many times your posts/comments were seen. This counts for nothing. It might boost your ego but doesn’t do anything else. Views pay you ZERO direct income! It may bring another referred member or two but you cannot count on it!
Reads: You need to split this into three.
- Read time from (paying)referred members: It is good that they read your post, but you will make only 50% of the potential income. The other 50% goes to whoever referred them into Medium.
- Read time from (paying) non-referred members: The more these types of readers you get, the better! You share the pie with the other writers these members read on Medium (based on ‘Read Time’).
- Reads from your comments: They help you engage with other readers and writers. But it gives you ZERO direct income. I confirmed this with Medium directly!
The ‘Read’ you see on your chart is a sum of all the above three. One pays you 100%, one pays you 50%, and the third pays 0%
Claps:
Again, ego booster! Some people clap once. Some clap 50 times. I don’t know if 50 claps do more to boost your views than just ten claps. Claps don’t pay you, but you can feel encouraged! But do remember, people do not have to read to clap. Clap and Run is a widespread phenomenon in the Medium universe!
Is it easy to find this breakdown?
- The tool consolidates your historical data and presents a complete summary of your medium life.
- It provides the splits between Reads of your post (potentially paying 50%-100% from reading time) and your Comments (pays 0%)!
- You can sort by most viewed/read today. You know what’s trending from your stories today!
- Provides additional insight on claps/fans per post
OK, that is great, so what?
- You will get a clear sense of your progress. The more insightful your data is, the better decisions you can make on your next steps.
- I realize that my posts are not as widely read as I thought. The correlation between my ‘Post Reads’ and my income makes sense. Around 15% of my ‘Reads’ don’t earn me anything!
- You can see which posts are trending today if you decide to promote a specific post. I watch this now and decide to do something about it (share on other platform, add links to new posts etc.,)
- You can download the data for a more detailed analysis. I will share on a later post! I’m still digesting the data and building my own dashboards.
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it — Peter Drucker
Writing is a tough world. If you are writing here to make some money, you might find Jim’s video very interesting. He explains the income potential from blogging.
If you liked this, you might also like the ones below — they are some of my biggest hits! They continued performing long after. I saw the result of the spikes in the fourth month.
You can also subscribe via email, I’ll send a weekly selection of my posts for free directly to your email!! Use this link!
— — — — — — — — —
Ever fancy becoming a writer? Get rid of all that useless crap from social media, get access to the work of thousands of amazing writers, become an author, and possibly make some money. It costs only $5 a month. Give it a go today! Use this link!
By the way, I write on a lot of other topics. More about what I write here!
Please follow me / subscribe to emails so you’ll know as soon as my next post is out.
