Better analytics for writers

As a writer, I’d like who is reading my stuff. If people read my articles all the way through. And where and why they stop reading. How about you?

I wrote this post is to understand what kind of analytics there are in Medium, and wether they do me any good. The reason is that I’m planning to build something in this space and build a business on top of that. Something that would go beyond measuring eyeballs, clicks or shares. Something that would connect the writer(s) and reader(s) in a new, meaningful way. I honestly believe that there’s huge, untapped potential in providing feedback loop for writers. And that feedback-loop might chance the way people write.

We’ve already seen that platforms that provide open analytics to their contributors, Buzzfeed for example, have been doing well. They essentially let a writer (or list composer) to learn from what they are doing as well as from others. This might sound bold, but if there would be radical transparency and everyone would be able to see the analytics on any given article. How would the world look after that?

Another question is: what should be measured? I believe that eyeballs is a false metric of engagement. Twitter followers is a bad proxy for writer reputation. How about using loyal readers (number of people reading at least 50% of your articles) and true reads (number of people who read more that 50% of the article)?

If you are a writer and your own vision, please tweet to me @kobrako and lets have a conversation. Also, if you’d like to follow how we are proceeding, sign up at Hacklog.