Most stories on Medium (and, frankly, most things on the web in general) see a similar traffic pattern: a spike on the day you publish and share it, and then the traffic tails off. But when you dig in, the stories that go viral see something different — their spikes last nearly a week, and they don’t actually peak until the third day.
To visualize these differences, I totaled the first 30 days of TTR (Total Time Read) for every story and calculated each day’s percentage of the total. Then I categorized them as low-traffic, high-traffic, and viral stories and plotted each category’s average daily percentage:
The lines show the typical spikes for each of these categories. Low-traffic stories, for example, average 32% of their 30-day TTR all on the publish day. Then they see 23% on the second day, 8% on the third day, and so on. The resulting chart nicely illustrates how different content circulates the web and travels beyond your personal network.
When you publish a story and share it with your friends, you’ll indeed see an initial spike on the first day that decreases thereafter. This happens for the low-traffic stories; your personal network views it and likely shares it a bit, and then the story doesn’t see much immediate traction beyond that.
The high-traffic stories are propelled beyond an author’s personal network. This often involves significant sharing on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter, popularity on forums like Reddit, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth via email and chat. But none of this is instant. It takes about a day, and these stories end up peaking the day after they are first published.
The viral stories go even farther. Examples include “Welcome to Dinovember” and “Baltimore City, You’re Breaking My Heart” — stories where entire conversations develop beyond the Medium platform. They get picked up by other publications, lead to new communities, and generally take on a life of their own (in the case of Dinovember, a book of its own). And while they still see initial spikes like any other story, all of this takes a few days — roughly, 4 days. When a story goes viral, that virality extends the spike outward so that it peaks slightly on the third day and only begins to die down on the fifth.
Alas, the news is bittersweet: getting a story to go viral is beyond your control, but when it does, you can ride the wave for almost a week.
