Your Story’s Impact: The Misleading Message on Medium’s Stats Page

Stats only tell part of the story.

Early this morning I leapt out of bed (okay OKAY, limped, since I have a bright purple pinky toe) and wandered, as usual, into the kitchen. My office is set up there, since my “office” is full of Everything Else, awaiting the Magic Day when the workers have finished installing hardwood and I can begin the business of finally setting up my new-to-me house.

I had another lovely gift from the curators. Another story selected, this time in Family, where I’ve not spent much time being curated. Most folks are wise enough not to let me anywhere near their family, for fear of getting cooties on them. But there it was.

By the way, for those about to give up all hope of curation, that story was written on August 20th, which gives you some indication of how overwhelmed everyone at Medium really is. Those of you who expect curation within thirty-three seconds after publication, well. Please.

Do your best work and keep right on working. If it gets curated, fine. If not, curation does not mean you don’t have an impact, even if said impact on your wallet is limited.

Which is my whole point.

Stay with me here.

A short while back, Illumination Creator Extraordinaire Dr Mehmet Yildiz expressed heartfelt frustration with some folks on our publication for what I would consider puerile behavior. I took what he penned and expanded on it:

As I perused the stats page which the Medium helpfully provided for my recently-curated piece, I was struck by something that is so simple, so obvious that it deserves to be teased out:

Stats lie.

They always lie. Stats lie because one side skews the stats their way, the other uses them another. Stats aren’t guilty, they are what they are. They are also skewed by the bias of those collecting stats. How you and I choose to see them (I’m f*cked, I’m a failure, I’M THE BEST WRITER ON MEDIUM) has nothing to do with the stats.

Stats are useful in so many ways.

However, let me establish a context. A few days ago my Medium buddy Rosennab and I were discussing an upcoming meeting with a corporate VP (if this isn’t a testament to the value of Medium, should you learn how to use it, nothing is), and we were discussing measurement. Rosenna has a PhD, which means she understands research and measurement. However, the reason I love working with her is that she knows that measurements- most particularly White Man Measurements (kindly, not dick size)- tend to serve the instruments of patriarchy, which is another way to say they serve continued oppression, rather than inclusion.

Such as how much money you and I make, as though that is the only indicator of human worth. But I digress.

Kindly, that kind of insight is just one of a million reasons why I love her. We seriously need to re-think stats, and not only that, why we think we need them, and what stats actually tell us, if we insist on using them. As Marcel Proust wrote,

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

So kindly, WTF does this Proust quote have to do with Medium stats and our profitability?

My story about why I am breaking my mother’s china has had all of 164 views so far. That piece, which took me a while to pen, has earned me all of $10.14.

Whew. Don’t spend it all on bubble gum, folks.

All that work for ten bucks?

After curation that may double. It sure isn’t going to go viral, as some articles have, with 50,000+ views. The Holy Grail of Medium writers. As it were.

Kindly. The only article I ever wrote, which was on Linked In some time back, got a million views. How much did I make?

Not a single penny. Here on Medium, I make pennies, just not very many of them. But I make a different kind of bank. Kindly read on. I’m still referencing the piece on my mother’s china here. This is where Proust comes into play.

So. What is the point, if stats aren’t?

Well, for one, this from Kathy Breen:

Oh my goodness, Julia! I was so worried I was going to get to the end of your piece to learn you threw out the Ivy China or sent it off to Goodwill, all in a major “purging your life” activity and I was going to be really pissed at you. Then this response would have been a scolding! But bless you. You’ve discovered, as did I, save it for what?? We’re only going to get older and then die. Enjoy everything you own, so if you decide you can’t enjoy using, wearing, or looking at some thing, then pass it on.

You’ve freed your mother’s china, and freed yourself to enjoy it. This past year, I finally quit saving things for the right event, the right moment. I wear my nicest blouse to the grocery store and don’t change into an old faded tee shirt when I get back home. I purposely wear a favorite bracelet swimming because I like the look and feel of it gliding underwater. So what if I get a stain on my blouse or lose my bracelet in the water. I will have least at enjoyed them while I could.

And this from Terri DelCampo-Nelson:

There was an episode of Little House on the Prairie where the mother was saving up to get real dishes instead of the speckled tin plates and cups that was all the family could afford. There was a whole dramatic struggle for getting this china.

At the end of the show they sat down at the table, set with the china and Laura's voiceover said that Mama used the china every single day because china wasn't meant for special occasions, but the special people in your life who would be using it. I never forgot that.

Those are the measurements, right there.

Kindly, this circles back to the point from Dr. Yildiz. It’s not about the money. It’s about the community. If all I cared about are stats that speak to my earnings(and oppressive patriarchal culture cares about Profit vs. People, which is to Rosenna’s point, above) then I am missing the point. The structures and constructs by which we gauge the importance of our work typically have nothing to do with the real value of our work.

For those of us who write to change the world, and I am not alone in that on Medium, this is what we care about. It’s lovely to get paid for it, and I do, and I use my Medium pieces to do a lot more, but the real point is my why. My why is to effing change the narrative we live under, which clearly is not working for far too many. False narratives about hate, and age, and race, and hopelessness, and a great deal more. Change the narrative, change the conversation, change the world.

Those are your stats right there.

So how might you and I change the conversation?

Several ways:

1. Read the highlights in your articles. Every single highlight says “this is important to me.” Made a difference. Made me think. Touched a responsive chord. Made me cry. Those are immensely powerful. This is the power of your words. This is a real stat.
2. Read the comments. This is an order of magnitude up from #1. Folks are investing in your work. In you. That’s a measurement for you. Folks took the the time to read, then to highlight, then to comment. You and I vastly underestimate not only the gift this is to us as writers, but we kick this aside in our eagerness to find out how much money we made.
3. Choose to put your focus on what really, truly matters. Human impact, human change, human insight and awareness, all of which are telegraphed to you and me via #1 and #2 above. Attend to the real impact. Numbers lie about people. People speak their truth to us by what they highlight and in their comments. The value of that, if you’ll forgive me, is impossible to measure. Which is of course the whole damned point.

When you and I ONLY focus on how many people read our pieces, and more importantly, how much money that got us, we dehumanize not only our readers but we also cheapen ourselves. We undermine our purpose. And we skewer our value by writing cheap clickbait headlines and mindless pap just to make bank.

You and I can only truly bank on feedback. If we have to have stats, kindly, they are already in your highlights and comments. There is some usefulness to the numbers. But if I may, numbers don’t love you for the gift of your words. How your words touched, changed, validated and uplifted them. Shifted them.

People do.

Just like pretty much every single time I read something by Dr. Bakari it changes me for the better. There are plenty of other immensely talented Medium writers whose work does that for me and many others.

That’s priceless.

Them’s your stats right there, folks.

To quote my Medium buddy Rebecca Stevens A.,

Thanks for reading my perspective.