Perusing My Medium Story Stats
A trip down memory lane (for me)
Arthur Keith recently published an article in which he drew some lessons from analyzing the stats of his Medium stories. I was inspired to examine the stats on my own stories, and I didn’t draw any lessons you would be interested in. But here are some things that I found interesting.
My most viewed story ever was October 2019’s Fire, Flood, Famine, War — The End Times Are Here, 4.2K views, 1.3K reads. (Note the low reads/views ratio.) It marked my entry into climate change doomster-ism. There weren’t very many of us at that time, four years ago.
It was the third story I ever published on Medium. Just being out there for four years may be one reason why it garnered so many views. But, in addition, almost all of my top-viewed stories are related to climate change. I guess it was a good story title, too.
My second most-viewed story is I am a trans woman. My boyfriend became a woman. It sucked. 3K views, 1.4K reads. This story was the very first article I wrote for Medium, but I didn’t publish it right away because I was uncomfortable about my partner Misha reading it. I knew it would ruffle her feathers, though that certainly wasn’t my intention. When it became clear that she was not reading Medium, I hit the publish button. It was the fourth article I published. To this day, she has not read it (or any of my Medium stories), as far as I know. (We just may have some communications issues in our relationship. Ya think?)
“I am a trans woman…” was the first of only two articles I’ve ever published that focus on transsexualism. The other one is My Sexuality, published last June, which garnered only 137 views and 85 reads. (So much for “sex sells!”)
Claps and comments are NOT good indicators of popularity! One of my most-viewed articles, Docker & node.js on Apple Silicon! Hooray!, from June 2021, has only two claps and zero comments. But it has 1.7K views and 1.2K reads. Go figure. And it is a mere 2 minute read, besides.
Contrarywise, I am a Multi-Millionaire but I am Afraid of Retirement, 1.2K views 1K reads, has 675 claps and 30 comments.
One of my least read stories is the very first one I published, What Happened to Podcasts? June 29, 2019. Too bad, because it was quite prescient. Podcasts very much went the way it predicted. In addition, it had a very cute cover picture (from Unsplash) that I have reused for this article.
Of the 88 stories I have published on Medium, only 9 reached 1K or more views, and only 6 achieved 1K or more reads. I have 1.2K followers and I do not monetize. My average publishing rate is a few stories every two months, although I have been publishing weekly pretty consistently recently.
Except for the two most-viewed stories, my read to view ratio looks pretty good. I find that gratifying. It signals that my writing is good, or my subjects are interesting, or both. Also that my titles are not click-baity.
As I mentioned before, the topic of climate change is far and away my most popular topic. But there are plenty of Medium writers covering that field these days, and the message has been spread pretty well. Therefore, I’ve tried to stop writing about that topic. In addition, I am attempting to stick to positive, uncritical stories for 2024. I don’t want to contribute to the downer that this year is going to be, what with the US Presidential election, climate change, wars, and so on. Watch this space to see if I can manage it! (Or, more likely, fewer and fewer readers will watch this space.)
