Medium Stats — ‘Read’ Is The Most Important Statistic You Should Focus On
By: Benny Lim
Tags: Writing On Medium, Médium, Writing, Statistics, Medium Stats

One of the most viewed pages on Medium has got to be the statistics page of every writer. I used to be so obsessed over it that I would check my stats page a few times a day, followed by my MPP page on a daily basis, just to see how well my articles are doing and how much I’m earning.

I’ve managed to tone it down a little now with my obsession to checking my stats page reduced to just once a day (usually at the start of the day) and checking my MPP page once every 2–3 days.

My focus has been more on creating content, rather than being so obsessed with my stats. But I totally understand why people do it because I did it for at least 8–9 months. Checking my stats seemed like an important thing to do on Medium and I know a lot of people who are still doing it. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it unless it becomes a hindrance to your work.

Back when I first started out on the MPP, the most important stat that everyone looked out for was the ‘fans’ section.

Screenshot of author’s stats’ page

That was because up until November 2019, your articles earned money based on how much claps it received from paying members. The more claps you get, theoretically, the more money you will earn. I say theoretically because that too depended on how often the reader claps for other articles. It was a bit complicated to understand at first.

Medium then decided to change the way articles earned money by taking the attention away from fans and instead focusing it onto reading time by members. But they insisted that the fans’ stats still mattered. Apparently the more claps your article gets, the higher the chances of it appearing on Medium’s main and featured pages.

Personally, it took me a while to get used to focusing on the new stat that mattered — read.

I was still constantly looking at how many fans I’d gotten since the last time I checked my stats page. And it was demotivating at times because it just dropped drastically. While I used to average at least 50–60 fans a day, it dropped all the way down to about 5–10 fans a day.

But my earnings were still the same as what it used to be. In fact, I was earning more because the moment a paying member read my article for a certain amount of time, I’ll make money there. It didn’t matter if they clapped for it or not. Back then, it didn’t matter how many people read your article, if they didn’t clap for it, you don’t earn anything. You could get a million views and reads but if not a single clap is given, $0.00 would be your earnings at the end of the day.

So for me, the new method was great. No matter what happens, the moment I get reads, I get money.

And thus, the focus shifted to how do I get my articles the reads they needed so that they’d earn money. That was the focus. I started to focus more on that — making sure content was up to standards, topics were of interest and layout was interesting so that it captures the readers’ attention.

After a while, I started to forget about the fans’ stats. And I no longer bothered about it. Medium tried to position it in a way that your fans would matter in a way that curation does. Just like how curation would put your article on the map of readers, claps from fans were supposed to do the same. But personally, I noticed that a lot of my best-performing articles only started to get fans AFTER it became viral. But before they became viral, they had very little fans but were still getting the read time that they needed to make money.

I may be wrong but I just feel that fans don’t matter so much anymore.

Although personally, I still give the maximum 50 claps for articles that I read and enjoy but that’s just me. It just feels right to give the maximum number of claps when I’ve read an article that I liked.

Another stat that has been quite a distraction for me but doesn’t matter as much is the ‘views’ stat.

As you can see from my above screenshot, my views are almost triple that of my reads but again, views would mean nothing if they are not then followed up by members reading your article.

As much as I love seeing big numbers on my views, I’d love to see it on my reads as well. But one thing that my views stats do tell me is that I was able to catch the attention of my readers but my content wasn’t good enough to hold it long enough for them to read through.

So, there are things that I’m doing right but there are also things that I could really improve upon. Focusing on the read stats for each of my articles will help me to determine which article does well and which don’t. I will then be able to dissect the non-performing ones and see what I need to improve on.

I’m hoping that by doing so, I will be able to increase the read to views ratio to above 75% for every article I write. Right now, I’m averaging about 58–65% read to views ratio.

I do get quite a good number of views but not enough of those views are translating into reads.

As for my fans stat, I honestly don’t pay so much attention to it anymore and I think it no longer matters that much to me. I’d rather focus on getting my articles curated than getting fans.

Time to get those read stats up!