How to Succeed on Medium: Understanding the Medium Data Metrics
Simple and Useful Tips to Analyze Your Content Performance Data and Graphs on Medium
You don’t always need to be a big data analyst to be successful!
Big data, machine learning, and big data analytics are buzzwords of the digital age and cause a lot of excitement. With big data, there is a common saying:
“…Everyone talks about big data, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”
In contrast, nobody talks about manual data analysis or data analysis using spreadsheets; it is relatively simple to do these, nobody thinks that anyone is doing it, and hence whoever does it does not talk about it.
In order to be successful in our business ventures, we need to have metrics or measurements, and in order to calculate metrics we need to analyze data. However, all data analysis does not require us to work with big data or apply programming languages such as Python and R.
Some data analysis can be done and visualizations can be created relatively easily using spreadsheets. Some data analysis can be even done manually by just looking at the data—however this is possible for small datasets only.
Whether you are able to manually analyze the data or need tools to analyze data, the first step is to define why you are analyzing the data—that is, your problem statement, and understand how the available data can help you and how you can use them.
Let me illustrate how you can do some simple and effective data analysis through the example of metrics on Medium.
How do you analyze your content’s performance using Medium metrics?
In Medium, we as writers write and publish our stories on the Medium platform either in one of the publications on Medium or on our respective profiles.
It is extremely necessary to analyse how your stories are performing in order to be successful as a writer on Medium. While I am using Medium as an example, this applies to content that you publish on any other platform on the Internet.
So here’s my problem statement —
“How is my content performing on Medium?”
To further address the above problem statement, below are the questions that I should be able to answer:
What data elements/attributes can I use to assess my content’s performance?
What do these data elements/attributes mean?
Why are these data elements/attributes important?
How do I use these data elements/attributes to do my analysis?
The next sections provide answers to the above questions.
What data elements can I use to understand how my content is performing on Medium?
Medium provides real-time statistics and a 30-day visualization dashboard on a number of elements to indicate how a writer’s stories are performing. You can view this by right-clicking on your profile image icon displayed on the top right-hand corner of Medium and then clicking on Stats in the list as shown in the screenshot below.
When you click on Stats, a writer’s stats are shown on the medium.com/me/stats webpage (see an example screenshot below). I will discuss what some of these metrics mean and how you can use them to assess your content’s performance.
Some of the data elements that can be used as metrics for content performance analysis on Medium are:
- Views
- Reads
- Read Ratio
- Member Reading Time
- Fans
What are the implications of these data elements and Medium metrics?
- Views — visitors who clicked on a writer’s story page.
- Reads — viewers who read a writer’s story.
- Read Ratio — percentage of article/story views that resulted in article/story reads. For example, if there were two story views and one story read, the read ratio would be 50%.
- Member Reading Time— This is Medium’s way of measuring how long a reader actively engages with an article. As Medium described in their post on the earnings update:
As a user reads, we measure their scrolls and take care to differentiate between short pauses (like lingering over a particularly great passage) and longer breaks (like stepping away to grab a cup of coffee). Reading time incorporates signal from your readers without hurdles. You don’t need to ask your readers to remember to clap, or click, or do anything other than read.
5. Fans — represent the number of readers who clapped for your story.
Why are these metrics important?
These metrics are important because they give us an idea of how much exposure and engagement a writer’s post has.
These metrics are interdependent. For example, member reading time is dependent on reads and views.
Member reading time is the total time spent reading the article on a particular day. Medium calculates a writer’s earnings based on the member’s reading time; however, this is only applicable to those who are a part of the Medium Partner’s Program.
Member reading time is important even if you are not part of the Medium Partner’s Program. This is because, the amount of time spent is a manifestation of how engaging the reader finds the story.
For example, if all the readers spend a couple of seconds on your story, which would take 5 minutes to read per reader, it means that they have not found the article interesting. In contrast, if the readers spend a lot of time reading the article, then it means that the readers have found your article interesting. As a result, the longer a member reads your story, the more engaging it is.
If the number of views is low, but the read ratio is high, this indicates that, while most viewers are reading your article, the article does not have good exposure, and you might want to look at the keywords that drive SEO traffic, so that article gets more exposure. If the article has a large number of views but the read ratio is small, there are very few viewers.
Last but not least, fans are perhaps one of the most important, yet often overlooked stats. In fact, until I read Kristina God’s story on fans on Medium, I was not aware of the importance of this important factor. Fans represent the number of readers who clapped for your story. Only Medium readers can clap for a story on the site.
Given the current structure of Medium’s clap system, each reader can clap anywhere from 1–50 times. So if an article has 500 claps, the number of unique readers who clapped for it could range between 10 and 500. If each of the readers clapped 50 times (that is the maximum number of claps per reader per article) for an article, then the number of unique readers who clapped for the article would be 10. On the other hand, if each reader clapped just once for the article, then with 500 claps, the number of readers who clapped for the article would be 500.
Why is member reading time dependent on views and reads?
Views indicate how much exposure your article has and how many readers are clicking on it. In contrast, Reads tells us how many viewers have read the entire story.
Usually only a percentage of views result in reads, so the higher the views, the higher the reads. The Read Ratio metric gives information as to what percentage of viewers read a Medium story. The higher the read ratio, the more people are interested in your article.
How do I use these data elements/attributes to do my analysis? Understanding the Medium Business Model
As per Kristina God, Medium’s business model is about connections and relationships.
As per Kristina God,
The moment we engage (=comment, clap, highlight) with a piece of another writer on Medium, the moment it’s more likely that this person will see your stories in their feed AND also his/her followers.
This means claps, comments, and highlights result in more views, which in turn, might convert into reads, claps, highlights, and comments.
I have personally seen a greater engagement with my articles, post claps, comments, and highlights.
Key Takeaways and Concluding Thoughts
- Each social media platform has some metrics that tell you how your content is doing. Medium has views, reads, read ratio, fans, and the amount of time readers spend on your post.
- Understanding the Medium data metrics and how they operate is a good starting point to help you achieve success on the Medium platform. Use these metrics to see how your content is performing. If it is not working well, do some research, change, and implement your strategy .
- If very few people are viewing or reading your post, you need to see what is going wrong there — it might be the content quality, article heading and/or subheading, wrong keywords, or even the timing of posting!
- Medium’s business model is about connections and relationships. The more you engage with another writer’s content, the more likely it is that your article will show up in that writer’s feed and also be seen by his or her followers. So let us grow together on Medium!
I sincerely hope this article helps you in your writing journey! I wish you all success!
Future posts will focus on these metrics in detail!
Thanks so much for reading! Take care!
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments! Please leave a comment here or connect on LinkedIn or Research Gate (Research Gate has most of my published work on different subjects, some of which can be downloaded for free).
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Biography: Rupa Mahanti is a consultant, data enthusiast, researcher, writer, spiritualist, and author of several books, mostly on data. She is also publisher of “The Data Pub” newsletter on Substack.
