What I Learned From Analyzing 1,000 Medium Collections
Collections are Medium’s lifeblood, but they are in trouble.
I love Medium. It’s a great platform that empowers non-professional writers to create and distribute better content. However, I have been underwhelmed by the recent Medium 1.0 update, particularly the tedious process by which writers must submit their work to collections.
I thought it would be interesting to look into collections since they are such a differentiating factor between Medium and traditional publishing platforms. I analyzed over 1,000 Medium collections and I am presenting some findings below. For those interested, I have posted the source code for the analysis here. I will also upload a tabular version of the data in the near future.
Background
I am interested in looking at how the changes to publishing stories, specifically how imposing that collection editors approve submissions might affect writers. Collections have a few interesting metrics that may impact writers, namely: number of followers, number of posts in the collection, and when it was last updated — and I wanted to see how…