Experimenting with mobile views on Medium
I have fallen in love with Medium. It is simple, elegant and offers a completely non-obtrusive experience.
BUT FIRST, SOME CONTEXT
It has been more than a month since I started writing everyday, and it has been fun. I can’t say it has been hard; but then, I have not really been filtering my thoughts much, have I? If I can’t think of something to write about, then I write about just that. Yes. I wrote about having nothing to write about once, and counting this instance, I think I have referenced that particular occurrence 4 times so far in different stories and contexts.
I am not someone who is popular here. I don’t have thousands of followers. But I didn’t expect it to be so, nor was that the intent. And, when you are using the editor window as an unfiltered dumping ground for your raw thoughts, then even the assumption that your stories would get a lot of attention would be best described as far-fetched. Yes, my stories aren’t pieces of art, and yesterday someone felt betrayed by the lack of finesse in them (to put it mildly).
I started writing on Medium with one goal — To write daily. To write daily as a means to inculcate some much needed discipline in my life. The live audience — who may discover my words — was a bonus. The sheer presence of that crowd made me always feel accountable. What it meant — I can’t copy paste text from the Lorem Ipsum generator; I needed to piece together words that made sense. A few publications took note (special shout to David Smooke, who reached out before anyone else had shown interest) and wanted to publish a couple of stories. Since then, I started writing on publications.
ON TO THE ACTUAL MEATY STORY NOW
Medium stats — no matter how useful — is still in quite a primitive state. I read somewhere that publications (specially those hosted on custom domains) get more options, but custom domain ones have the option to simply use Google Analytics, I believe. So, the analytics on Medium still needs work.
I was going to say “sucks”, but that would be wrong. Be it the emails you receive or the stats page you see, they are doing a decent job of telling you at least some relevant information.
Make no mistake though — it is far better than that offered by many out there, including platforms like Quora.
There are two things you should know about me:
- I love experimenting
- I don’t like to sit too long in the planning state. I would rather execute a ‘decent’ work than wait for it to be chiseled to perfection.
So, today I was just thinking of the stats page. And I wanted to see something. Here are the stats for a couple of stories.
But, this is what I want you to focus on. The data from referrers for each one of these stories.
Now, my interpretation of this data might obviously be wrong. After all, there are few things I don’t yet know about:
- The flipboard data — is it from the flipboard website or the app?
- Twitter/Facebook — Website or app?
- RSS readers — on web or mobile?
- The email/im/direct traffic — Is it all on mobile? I have taken it so, and won’t worry about the repercussions here.
Basically I don’t know what percentage of this traffic is coming from the mobile devices? But going with my assumptions, it is safe to say that at least a fourth of this traffic is.
I just realised that there are few entries for android-app:
Sorry that I missed on that before. Factoring that in will change the computations, but not by much. So let’s learn to live with it for the time being.
And these numbers — 25%, 33%, 38% — raised a question.
Why are we not making sharing capabilities easier for these readers?
Medium focuses on content creation and consumption. As a result, everything else is obscured out of the view. It is not a wrong approach. For the intent that medium has, this is great.
But aren’t stories meant to be heard?
If so, why not make sharing capabilities easier — specially for a medium that is sending you a third of the traffic you get?
So I decided to do exactly that.
Starting this story, all my stories will contain links that will enable a reader to share the story with their friends on whatsapp. Why single out whatsapp? I have got 1 billion monthly active reasons for you. But to avoid being slapped the tag of favoritism, I am throwing in a fb share and tweet buttons as well.
WILL IT HELP?
I don’t know.
Unable to implement any analytics into it, at the moment. To be fair, I don’t have a way of implementing analytics for whatsapp share as of now, but I do for twitter and facebook. But it is a rather messy solution, so I may be avoiding it in future.
If anyone has any ideas on how to do that, do let me know — Abhishek Anand
Also, the view looks really really messed up on desktops. But looks quite neat on mobile. Here is a comparison. (I may improve on the design etc with time, but for the time being — leaving it as is)
LIKE THE STORY? SHARE WITH A FRIEND!
