Who Are the Most Inspirational Authors on Medium? (Statistically)

An analysis of the 107 most internally linked authors on Medium.com

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Have you ever wondered which writers inspire other writers the most? That was my mission today, and here are the results!

I measured the number of times an author is referenced or linked to within Medium itself. I then ranked them from the highest to lowest.

Now when I say inspiring, this is obviously a very subjective term. Trying to quantify inspiration is a pretty difficult task.

But I had to choose one word, so I went with inspiration. Other ways to look at these results could be:

• Usefulness of material
• Shareability
• Likeability

Either way, these results are quite interesting to me — and maybe to you too!

In the below list, I included the author's name, the number of followers, what categories they write in — and what rank they are in terms of being referenced on the platform.

How I sorted the data

I used a combination of tools in the Medium platform itself as well as a 3rd party SEO tool to do this.