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.

The distribution of the number of followers per Medium collection. The top panel shows the raw data at uneven intervals. The data is transformed in the bottom panel by taking the logarithm of the number of followers to better visualize the data

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…