Your Headlines Sucked. These Didn’t. Why?

A Data-Driven Guide to Contagious Headlines on Medium

Published in

The Swipe File

5 min readOct 14, 2014

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” — David Ogilvy

Headlines don’t seem all that difficult to write. So why the hell do 99% of our articles remind us of this photo?

A good headline enhances the probability that our ideas get the attention they deserve. As a writer, I was curious to answer this question: How are Medium’s most popular headlines constructed? I started exploring an answer by delving into data.

Which Were the Most Popular Articles?

A few weeks ago, I started an experiment by scraping the headlines for the Top 10 Medium posts from September 2013 — August 2014 using Import.io (based on the monthly Top 100 charts produced by Medium, which is based on time spent reading).

There were 96 unique articles in the 119 spots (for some reason, could only scrape 9 articles in July 2014). That means some articles made it to more than one Top 100 list in a Top 10 position. (Holy mackerel!)

These were what I call “super articles”. Here they are, in no particular order:

Despite the extremely, extremely, small sample size, there are some interesting observations from these articles at the tip of the tip of the iceberg:

Lists work, the number “7" comes up twice. The nouns are “things,” “tricks,” and “reasons.” Not necessarily the most mindblowing. Rather, what’s noticeable is the “gimmick”: one is about things you need to stop doing (most articles are about what you should be doing), one is about appearing smart (as opposed to being smarter), and one is about why you will never do amazing things with your life (challenging). Contrary. Irony. Challenge.
“The Problem With” seems to be a good starter. I suspect this is not only because it piques a reader’s curiosity, but also because it helps the author frame the article well.

Don’t get too paralyzed by the specific diction here. Ship. When you’re writing your different headline ideas (Upworthy and Onion do 25 headlines per article), focus on the big idea and the “gimmick”, the twist that will get people’s attention.

What Were the Most Popular Words?

I also separated headlines into individual words and charted their frequency. Figured it’d be a good way to start:

As you might be able to tell, I’m not terribly exciting with Excel.

Over half of these headlines were between 3–5 words. (12.5% with 3 words, 8.3% with 4, 18.75% with 5. Not to mention another 13.5% had 6 words.)
The word “I” (15 occurrences) was more popular than “You” (11). “My” (9) and “Your” (7) follow closely. Stories are extremely important on Medium, especially personal ones. Prepare to be vulnerable.
“Why” (12 occurrences) and “How” (10) were #5 and #7 respectively on the frequently used word list. Despite what you may think of them, those standard, overused headline formulas still work. (Damn.)

If I had charted it, there would be a standard long-tail distribution here, with the most popular words being “The,” “To,” “I,” “A,” and “Why.” A bit of a bummer, I was hoping to find a “silver bullet” adjective or something.

A little detail: I’ve seen many popular headlines with the words “…and this happened next…” as part of the structure, but I was surprised to see that the word “this” only showed up once out of all the headlines (“My startup failed, and this is what it feels like”).

Still, the data was too fragmented here I think (the words on their own lacked context).

How About the Most Popular Articles on Facebook?

I also used the SharedCount API to investigate into which were shared the most across the social networks. Facebook is arguably the most important social network when it comes to spreading content, so the ten articles on Medium with the most activity (Liked and shared) on Facebook were:

I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks. Here’s How It Changed My View of Humanity (a whopping 310,493 Likes/shares)
10 Things No One Tells Women about Turning 40 (211,588)
A Gentlemen’s Guide To Rape Culture (170,145)
How a password changed my life. (94,542)
How to Be Polite (63,751)
An Open Letter to My Son’s Kindergarten Teacher (53,654)
You Probably Shouldn’t Go See Ridley Scott’s Pretty Racist ‘Exodus’ Movie (47,770)
Face it black people. Michael Brown let you down. (41,828)
Trigger Warning: Breakfast (41,273)
You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now? (37,442)

It appears as though word length doesn’t really matter here. In fact, three of these articles have more than one sentence.

Closing Thoughts

I still have many other questions: What were their first paragraphs structured like? What were the themes of these articles? How many minutes were they? What other common characteristics did they share? What about #1 from each month — what did they have in common? Did the ones that got shared the most on Twitter and Facebook mean the users were already popular on these platforms?

If you’re interested in further exploring these questions, stay in touch to get notified when I publish my full findings.