First Month On Medium Stats Exposed
Here’s what the data looks like for a new Medium user account after posting every day for a full month.
I recently saw Ashuni Shah’s article that talks about their medium stats after a consistent month of posting. This inspired me to write up a short account of my own experience during my first 30 days posting on Medium.
My Account Background
I joined Medium in the beginning of August ’23 and made a commitment to post every day for an AI challenge I was interested to complete. I wrote up an article every day after doing my investigation/exploration as part of the challenge — this meant that I had 30 days of continuous daily posting for the month of August.
The topics for the articles were all related to generative AI. However, the length of the articles varied from the lower bound of ~3 minute reads up to about ~20 minute reads. While I was a newbie to many facets of generative AI during this challenge, I have a strong background in tech which started me off with a substantial foundation for the articles.
Things I Didn’t Do With My Posts
In general, my intent for creating my Medium account was to document my journey on this first 30-day challenge. I went with Medium because it was the easiest blogging solution to get started on. I did not create my account with the intent to maximize followers or stats. Specifically I didn’t do any of the following (which might be useful for new users seeking to establish a follower-base):
- Promote the articles (aside from making a single tweet on a brand new Twitter account linking to the post)
- Publish to any publications. On a few articles I had some publications reach out to me to ask if I’d be interested in publishing to them, which I opted not to do
- Pay for a premium Medium account
- Make a point to comment on articles, or otherwise interact with other Medium users
Medium Stats Breakdown
Article Stats
- 31 articles posted, 100% of them free (no paywall)
- ~556 total views
- 0 responses (after spam removals)
- ~70 claps
- 7 followers gained
Bonus — Twitter Stats
At roughly the same time I created my Medium account I also created an accompanying Twitter account. I used this Twitter account to create a tweet linking to each article after they were published. In some cases I tweeted at another account if they were related to the article (e.g. the creator of an app I tested, or a book I read, etc.).
It’s also worth noting that my new Twitter account seemed like it was in a restricted mode for a long time. I noticed this when I saw that other users couldn’t see my posts under a tag. This restriction might be some kind of anti-botting measure added by the Twitter team, or some way to push accounts to purchase premium (which I didn’t).
Twitter Stats Breakdown
Twitter View Stats
- Max view count on a single tweet — 266
- Median view count for tweets — ~5
- Median engagement rate for tweets— 0%
- Max engagement rate for a single tweet — 100%
- 2 followers gained
<< EOM >>
I haven’t decided whether or not I want to continue using this account (or writing more posts on Medium), but it’s been a pretty eventful journey so far.
I hope this article ends up being useful to give some grounding to any aspirational Medium bloggers out there.
