Getting your Medium stats
As of 2023/08/25 this tool and approach no longer works as intended. Medium has finally changed their stats page and it’s information structure. Leaving this here for reference only. Thanks everyone who used, commented and enjoyed it.
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I wanted to track my medium stats over time, to see how the numbers changed by article. Now the Medium stats are basic, but even so I really needed to get regular exports of them, as they are always shown as the current aggregate. What I ultimately wanted to do was to stick them in Qlik Sense and dig a little deeper.
Try as I might I couldn’t find an easy way to grab the stats from Medium. I tried webscrapers, but as the stats are behind the login I had issues and they were a pain in the butt to set up and run. For a while I even manually cut and paste them, but as I now have 100+ articles it’s way too painful. In the end I thought I’d take a stab at making a small tool to capture them.
So here’s my first cut of it. It’s a simple Chrome extension that grabs the story stats from the page and downloads them as a .csv file.
A couple of things to be aware of:
- You need to be logged in and on your stats page,
- because of the lazy load you’ll need to scroll until all stories are showing,
- finally, when you hit the ‘M’ icon of the extension, the CSV file will be created — to save escaping characters etc its delimiter is a ‘|’ so you need to import it into excel etc.
Data structure looks like so: mediumID|title|link|publication|mins|views|reads|readRatio|fans|pubDate|liveDate
- pubDate added to v1.2
- liveDate added to v1.3 (as this is the date displayed on the article)
- v1.4 Bug fixed that was stopping csv generation — thanks Jenni for the heads up
- v1.5 bug fixed due to format change (v 1.5 should be available on Chrome by 10th March 2019) — for local version of 1.5 visit git hub
- v1.6 Aug 2021 — bug fixes due to format change (updated on Chrome store and github)
The filename includes the date, and you can generate specific ones for your publications too (will include publication name instead of ‘MyStats’). Also picks up data from the ‘Responses’ tab (your responses to other articles) but haven’t got any ‘Series’ so unsure if it can be captured.
Still manual but way less painful than cut and paste.
Hope it will be useful for a few other people too, here’s the link to the Chrome Extension: Medium Stats Grabber.
