Why Doesn’t Medium Give Us Better Analytics?
By: Ryan Nehring
Tags: Writing Life, Writing, Data, Data Science, Analytics

A developer's perspective.

Image by Benjamin Hartwich from Pixabay

I don’t think I’m making too many assumptions when I say that we all, as Medium writers, would like to better understand how our pieces are read and how they earn. To that end, we have the Medium “Stats” dashboard; a simple, clean, often misleading, and woefully underpowered source of analytics data.

As a piece of design work, I’d call it a success. It fits the Medium aesthetic and seems to echo Ev’s general vision of minimalism. The problem, however, is that analytics shouldn’t be minimal. They should be accessible, easy to understand at a glance, but as dense as you’re willing to explore. Developers know this, we build dashboards all the time, and Medium undoubtedly has some of the most talented developers writing code in the known universe; so why have a team of Ferrari engineers built us a Honda Civic?

At a glance, we can see our views, reads, and fans. All good information that sort of hints at the data we really need without actually giving it to us; reading time. The Medium pay model is now based on reading time, yet to see how much time anyone has spent reading our pieces, we have to click through to each article itself.

Clicking through to the article detail page gives you some more, although often confusing or outright misleading information. If my story takes 5 minutes to read, and 100 members have read it, why is my member reading time only 2 hours? These disparities are constant and glaring, and when reading time is our money earning metric, seems particularly troubling.

Protecting the algorithm

There is a pretty fair argument to be made that giving us all of the granular low-level data would expose too much of how the payment algorithm works, and in doing so, jeopardize it through gamification. As a developer, I can understand and sympathize with that; as a writer, I’m frustrated at where they chose to draw that line.

Additionally, I’m not entirely sure I buy it. At this point, Medium has been pretty transparent about how we’re paid. We understand it comes down to reading time, so why is that data still be obfuscated or at least poorly rendered?

Core site/branding redesign

I suspect that the real culprit behind our not having better analytics is an issue of priority. It’s pretty clear Medium has been revamping its branding, UI, front page (a couple of times now), and looking for ways to continue to grow the site, rather than refining its authorial experience.

That kind of work and growth for a site of this scale takes a ton of development talent and time. It takes more work than most would guess to make a site as powerful as Medium feel so simple and clean, particularly when you consider the uncountable number of ways it’s accessed both on desktop and mobile experiences.

Dozens of possible screen resolutions across a hundred variants of a half dozen or so popular browsers worldwide, running on an infinite number of possible hardware configurations results in an indescribably large problem set. Each new feature or change has to be tested against, at the very least, a critical mass of the most popular browser/hardware configurations, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for carefully crafting expert analytics dashboards for authors.

Three easy, fast improvements that could be made now

If we concede that, at least for now, our data access is not a high priority for Medium, we can at least look for the easy answers that could improve our lives.

Firstly, give us reading time as a top-level metric. Total combined reading time on any given day would make a wonderful fourth tab right next to “Fans”, and would require almost no effort. It doesn’t need any new design, and the data is already there to be rendered.

Secondly, fix the read time disparities or better explain what constitutes “a read”. If I see 100 member reads on a 1-minute article, the total member read time should be pretty close to 100 minutes, with a little wiggle room for people who read slightly slower or faster than Mediums guess at how long it takes to read my piece.

And lastly, at least incorporate the improvements made through the “Medium Enhanced Stats” Chrome plugin. Showing us our total number of claps on the dashboard, and give us a way to export our data!