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How to use Medium stats to find and understand your readers
And what tools you can use to improve them
When you publish a story on Medium, you can see how Medium readers reacted — did they click on it? Did they read it? Did they become followers or subscribers of yours?
In this story, I break down where to find your stats pages, what the numbers mean, and how best to use them to improve your writing on Medium.
Let’s dive in. If you prefer watching, you can watch the video version:
Table of contents
· Table of contents
· Where to find your stats
· Breaking down your four main stats pages
· How to use these stats
∘ How to increase your presentations on Medium
∘ How to get more views
∘ How to get more reads
∘ A final tip: notify your subscribers when you publish a new story
· Use these stats to put yourself in the reader’s shoes
∘ Further reading
Where to find your stats
On the left, open the sidebar, and click stats. Here’s where you’ll be taken to all the stats you have at your disposal.
On the app, go to your profile at the bottom right and then select “view stats.”
Breaking down your four main stats pages
Once you’re on your stats pages, you have four main stats pages available to check out.
First of all, the big picture stats: how many presentations, views, reads, followers, and subscribers you got that month:
I want to quickly explain what presentations mean since I know that might be a term that some readers are not familiar with. When we present your story to a potential reader, that’s called a presentation. If you go to your homepage, you’re being presented with stories to choose from. Here’s more information about presentations on Medium.
This graph that breaks down how many views and how many reads you got from all your stories day by day.
You can time-slice by month if you’re interested in seeing how those numbers have changed over time.
Scrolling down, you’ll get a more granular breakdown of story by story, how many presentations, views, reads and earnings if you’re enrolled in the Medium Partner Program.
You can also time slice by various different factors if you want to look at, for example, the highest earning or the most read.
If you’re interested in finding out more about your subscriber or follower growth, that’s in the Audience tab. You’ll be able to see month by month and year by year how your audience grew on Medium.
If you’re enrolled in the Partner Program, you’ll also have the Partner Program Earnings tab which shows you how much money your stories earned this month in previous months, and if you scroll down, you’ll also be able to see how much money each story contributed to your earnings both this month and lifetime.
As a quick reminder, you can earn money by writing on Medium. When you are a medium member, you can enroll in the Medium Partner Program and put your story behind the paywall. When paying Medium members read your story, you earn some money.
Now, let’s check out the fourth and most detailed stats page that you have available to you: the individual story stats page. You can get there by clicking on the title of any story in your big picture stats page.
For each story, you can see how many readers in the story’s lifetime chose to follow you, subscribe, unfollow, or unsubscribe.
You can also get a month by month and day by day breakdown of how the story performed. Here you’ll see that member activity is in gold and non-member activity is in gray.
For each month, you can go even more granular to see how many views and reads you got per day, as well as the behavior of the readers who checked out your story, clapping for it, highlighting it, following you, and again, and still broken down by the gold members or the gray non-member activity.
The idea with the member/non-member activity split is to give you an overview of all the metrics that contribute to your earnings. Since only member engagement helps your story earn, we wanted to make that division clear. (You can read more about how Medium stories earn here.)
You can also see behavior from your readers off Medium, too. Here, you’ll see that internal includes basically everything it says right here on our homepage, the app, the emails.
Every visitor or reader that didn’t come from Medium goes into external referrals. That can be search traffic, it can be social media, but it can also be as simple as you sending a link to your friend.
Finally, you can also use these topics to get a better sense of what your readers are interested in reading all across Medium. For example, the readers of this story are also interested in writing, psychology, and mental health, among other topics.
How to use these stats
Before I go too deep into the advice portion, allow me to caveat: there’s no one way to use these stats. Every writer is unique, writing about different things, in different ways, for different readers.
The best advice I can give for you right now, no matter what you write about or what your reader likes, is to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and try to understand what would make them click on a story, stay to read it and choose to follow the writer. That information is going to be the most useful and the most useful thing that you can use to improve your own stats here.
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That being said, here’s how we recommend using your stats to improve your reach and readership on Medium.
How to increase your presentations on Medium
You might be wondering what causes Medium to present your story to readers across the platform. Medium is constantly presenting readers with tons of different stories based on what we think they’re going to be most interested in. I recommend you check out how story distribution works on Medium, but in short, we take into account:
- Whether the reader follows a publication
- Whether they follow the writer
- Whether they follow the topic that the story is about
- How similar readers have already acted on that story — have they clicked on it? Have they read it? Have they clapped for it?
- Each reader’s previous reading history
For example: If somebody’s reading a about cats, they follow you, they follow the cats topic, they follow the publication you’re publishing in, they’re more likely to be presented your story about cats.
While you can’t control a reader’s interests or reading history, you do have tools that you have at your disposal to increase presentations: publications and topics.
When you publish a story on Medium, you can choose to add up to five topics that help tell Medium and readers what your story is about.
I have created a video and story about how to use the right topics for your story:
The second factor you have in your control is the publication. So as a new writer especially, you’re not going to have a pre-existing audience, which means that the pool of potential readers that Medium could show your story to is going to be a little smaller than someone who has a lot of followers already. You can mitigate that by piggybacking off the back of a publication audience instead.
When you submit to a publication and the editor accepts your story, Medium’s algorithm will present your story to some followers of that publication, also depending on their reading interests. But you already know are interested in reading your story, because you’re writing it for a publication that is about that topic, and those readers chose to follow the publication.
I’ve made a whole video and story about how to submit to a publication on Medium already, so if you haven’t seen that already, I highly recommend you check it out and use it to help find good-fit pubs for your stories.
Our data scientists have seen that when stories use all five topics and submit to publications, they are more likely to get more presentations — no matter if you have zero followers or a hundred thousand.
How to get more views
Now, once Medium presents your story to a reader, that’s where it’s more down to you. How do you optimize that?It goes back to putting yourself in your reader’s shoes.
One exercise I like to recommend is that every writer. every so often, go to their homepage and think to themselves: Why would I or wouldn’t I click on these stories? What makes a clickable one appealing to you? What makes a non-clickable one not interesting?
Take what you can from those clickable elements and include them in your own writing, where applicable.
You can also do this on a topic page to get a more tailored sense of how your target reader might behave. For example, if I write a lot about cats, I might go to the cats topic page and see which of these cat stories is most resonant in clicking.
Breaking it down, a story’s clickability comes down to a couple key elements:
- The title
- The subtitle
- The header image
- The writer’s bio
The title and subtitle are very important to get right to basically tell your reader why they should click on your story. Because remember, Medium is showing your story to readers who have never heard of you, they don’t know you, they don’t trust you yet. The title is your first chance to say, check out my story. Here’s why you’re going to like it, or here’s why you’re going to get something useful from it.
With the image, it’s difficult to give too much advice because for some for some topics, certain images are better than others. You can imagine for example that in data science, a chart could be appealing to those readers, while for those interested in food or photography, some high quality photos will be better. Again, checking out the topic pages will be helpful.
Finally, let’s talk about your bio. When a reader is deciding whether or not to click on your story they may mouse over your bio to learn a little bit more about you and decide whether they should trust you and read your story. We’ve collected some best practices and examples of bios here:
How to get more reads
At this point in the reader journey, Medium has made a good bet: the algorithm has shown your story to a reader. You’ve done your job, and accurately communicated to the reader why they should click on it. You have the view. How can you turn them into a reader?
Here’s where it really comes down to story. Is your introduction compelling? Does it deliver on the promise of your title? Does it make your reader want to keep reading to get more information?
This is important because you might think, based on what I’ve said so far, that the best thing you can do is throw up a really shocking image and slap on a clickbait title to get those views.
That’s actually going to be counterproductive. First of all, clickbait is only eligible for network only distribution, which is our most limited tier of distribution.
Secondly, readers hate clickbait. If you go for a title like, “This INSANE way to lose ten pounds OVERNIGHT really works,” there’s no way you can deliver on that promise because that’s impossible as far as I know.
So while a reader might click into it, they’ll quickly leave, telling Medium’s algorithm that that story is not valuable for that particular reader and making Medium less likely to recommend your story to a reader in the future.
Whereas if they click it and actually stick around to read it, that tells Medium that the story was valuable to a reader, which in turn makes the Medium more likely to recommend it.
A final tip: notify your subscribers when you publish a new story
Once you’ve been writing on Medium for a while and you’ve started to build up subscribers, you’ll have the option to notify the subscribers every time you publish a story. So when it makes sense, that’s the best way to increase your presentations, views, and reads because you’re sending your story to the readers who have told you that they are most likely to want to read it.
Use these stats to put yourself in the reader’s shoes
Medium’s job is to bring the most valuable story to the reader who’s most likely to be interested in it. In short, all these stats are our attempt at helping you understand what goes through a reader’s mind when they decide to click, read, and follow you for more of your work.
You can use these numbers to really get a sense of what your readers love, what titles work for them, what topics they’re most interested in reading from you, what publications they hang out in.
Enjoy your stats, use them to understand your readers, and happy writing!
