Chapter 2: Understanding
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“Medium matters because of what it is: something that looks really familiar, but is actually quietly something truly new.”
- @adash
What Is It?
Background
Medium was cofounded in August of 2012 by serial entrepreneurs Ev Williams and Biz Stone. Ev in particular is a bonafide O.G. of blogging; he was in the game when publishing your thoughts online was still called web logging. In fact, he actually coined the term “blog” when he launched Blogger, which was was later acquired by Google in 2003. He then went on to help shape the way that humanity shares and consumes bite size information by founding Twitter along with Biz and others, and we all know how that turned out. (Really well!)
Medium is just the next logical step in Williams’ three product series to supply billions of people with digital communication tools that can have a material impact on the world. Blogger gave pajama bloggers the tools to compete with the media moguls. Twitter decentralized broadcast distribution and gave the power to anyone with Internet access. Ev played the long form and he rocked the short form. Now it’s time for him to tackle the Medium.
Ev’s track record is relevant because it shows that if anyone is qualified for the job of changing how we consume and create digital content, it’s him. He has an uncanny ability to see a penultimate vision for a platform before others do, and he is particularly skilled at building and scaling products that allow people to communicate. Medium is the latest iteration of a formula that has worked extremely well for him twice before: make it easy to communicate and watch what happens.
This time around, Ev is building Medium as a place where viral information is more substantive. Great things can get attention on Medium, and writers and readers are expected to exercise critical thinking, novelty, and imagination. Medium is raising the standards for what is published online by making it tremendously effortless to create and consume quality content.
“We’re re-imagining publishing in an attempt to make an evolutionary leap, based on everything we’ve learned in the last 13 years and the needs of today’s world.” — @ev
But it isn’t just about making it easy, it’s about making it rewarding for both writers and readers alike. Medium has an ambitious goal that no other platform has done before — create an internal distribution system that pairs stories with their most receptive audiences at scale. It’s a digital democracy where all have the right to a voice and an opportunity to be heard, but attention is an earned privilege for those who work for it.
“…[T]he way media is changing isn’t entirely positive when it comes to creating a more informed citizenry. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding…?” — @ev
In the early days of the web, there was a problem. Only a small fraction of the web community actually had the means to contribute. Like it or not, we conclusively solved that problem. Now nearly anyone is empowered to share their thoughts, feelings, and musings on the web. Publishing access is virtually ubiquitous across developed nations and rapidly becoming more available even in developing ones. Tools like Blogger, Wordpress, and even Twitter and Facebook allow everyone and anyone with basic technical skills and an Internet connection to have a voice.
The level of contribution to the web is not fixed; it has has grown by leaps and bounds since the early days and is still increasing year over year. The material produced is often light, shallow, and pithy. Groundbreaking journalistic breakthroughs that include what your high-school friend’s cat ate for dinner come to mind.
While ubiquitous contributory power is indeed a good thing, it’s consequently created another challenge - it’s very difficult to sort through the clutter and find what is valuable and interesting to you.
Medium is a breath of fresh air in a world of digital congestion. A citizen of the Internet is given the power to read and be read in long, thought-provoking form. To take the time to crystalize and catalogue thoughts. To harness the abstract conscious and unleash its power on proverbial paper. To influence the world, one story a time.
“[T]he web is a cluttered place. Medium brings some order — visual, editorial — to the web.” — @veaseyc
Since the beta launch, users have flocked to the platform to consume content and share stories — at least 40,000 are published each month.
Prominent financiers like Google Ventures and Greylock Partners (invested in Facebook, LinkedIn and Tumblr) poured in $25 million in January of 2014 to allow Medium to continue its mission. All signs seem to point that household name recognition and ubiquity is an inevitability. The platform is here to stay for a while, so it’s a smart move to become familiar with it.
Ethos
“Think YouTube, not Blogger. Hard Knocks, not Harvard.” — @anildash
Medium is a place for everyone. Whether you are a best selling author or a new mom taking to publishing for the first time, your story is what is most important— not your background. The platform exists to amplify the voices of those who are traditionally excluded from exposure and accreditation.
People of all types use Medium to create and consume knowledge, stories, and ideas with one another. Stories of all types are welcome — short or long, light hearted or deep, transformative or inconsequential. Within the community, people find an audience for their thoughts and get to peek inside the minds of others. Part publisher, part publishing platform, and part social network, the product is an evolving experiment two years in the making.
In one way, it’s a blogging platform. But in so many other ways, it’s much more than that. To call Medium just another a blog product is to call a tiger a house cat — it’s kind of an understatement.
Medium is a digital utopia where people can discuss things that can make a positive difference in the world, rather than shamelessly self promoting and competing for views. It’s a place for thoughts of more than 140 characters, and for ideas that should be shared more broadly than within just a circle of friends. It’s a community that is greater than the sum of its parts where you can work with others to create something better than you could in isolation.
Some describe Medium as a beautifully tantalizing and emotionally evocative crowd sourced magazine for the design-first digital age. Writers plug into a network of receptive readers; some are awaiting a niche story and others are ready to digest the ones with mass appeal.
It’s important to understand that Medium is still young and developing. In the digital era that comes after banner ads, Medium is important because it will be the testing ground for the importance of quality in expression. It’s the next logical iteration in the life of blogging. And it’s a long time coming . After all, blogging has remained largely unchanged for over a decade.
“[Medium is] a platform that helps words shine, because it seems like that’s what’s needed now.” — @ev
Medium is leading the charge on a cultural shift, which is far from easy. But look to the iPhone for an already executed playbook on how to influence droves of people and create a change in paradigm. When the iPhone was introduced, it featured skeuomorphism design that used cues from the physical world to create context and understanding for the digital one.
For five years, we slowly adjusted until we were ready for the brave new world of flat design. By the time that iOS 7 was introduced, Apple had held the hands of hundreds of millions of people whose previous tech resume only included setting up an email account. In half a decade, they were now sharing photos, downloading apps, and attuned to the latest and greatest to come out of Cupertino. Entire user bases were escorted from near luddite status to techno wizard and tech lingo entered their everyday vernacular. Courtesy of Apple, users’ skill sets, tendencies, and habits evolved. People learned and grew without even realizing it.
The same holds true with Medium. By making composition an order of magnitude simpler and easier, people will publish meaningful and substantive thoughts previously constrained to only their own cranium.
The introduction of television decades ago was supposed to make us better people — smarter, better educated, and more informed. That may have worked for some time, but it seems that even Discovery Channel is not immune to the quality creep that makes shows like Billy Bob’s Gags To Riches and Eaten Alive an inevitability.
We are entering a critical juncture with online content, too. Much like the obesity epidemic sweeping the country, our minds are addicted to the lightweight, junk food content that we all know isn’t beneficial in the long run, but we seldom stop to do something about it.
Medium knows they can’t force people to consume enriching content exclusively, but they can build a platform that seamlessly and systematically introduces readers to it. Built on civic responsibility and fueled by social altruism, Medium’s mission is big — change the world for the better by rewarding things that have lasting value. Medium is Whole Foods Market for the mind.
Medium allows for a wide orbit for freedom of expression. And even when that expression pushes the boundaries of what is culturally appropriate, Medium’s general view is that empowering others to express their response is more powerful than censoring the original creation. It’s an interesting take that will have First Amendment fanboys jumping for joy.
Few, if any, know how the platform will mature over the next decade. But the boys and girls at Medium have a very clear mission that is perpetuated throughout the platform. They are betting big that people will read, they will read a lot, and that somewhere along the way there’s a viable business for Medium and for its community of writers.
Benefits
Content creation is one of the most effective strategies in online marketing and distribution right now. Those with a deep understanding on how to be effective are making sales, earning users, and gaining awareness for their cause. By writing on Medium, you are rapidly accelerating your velocity on that learning curve.
Writers take to Medium because they can gain personal or professional exposure by sharing something with a much larger audience. If your own blog is a quaint bed & breakfast in Maine, Medium is the busiest hotel in Times Square.
You may not make money directly from Medium, and not everyone does. But you do gain credibility and a crowd. Exposure may not pay the bills, the opportunities that arise from getting in front of people do.
The secret sauce to Medium is its meritocratic nature. Sure, some authors have more followers, or a recognizable brand name, but Medium makes every attempt to make the platform as level of a playing field as possible. Follower counts can surely help, but it’s the quality of the story that has the most weighted benefit. Total newbies to the platform have their first stories take off like rockets. To this day, my very first post entitled “I Lasted 37 Hours On Android” was my most viewed story with 57,000 reads. A whopping 94% of people read it all the way to completion. At that time, I had no more than a handful of followers and didn’t promote the story at all. Yet, it shot to the top.
Medium aims to empower those with something interesting to say, independent of the number of their digital followers or their online influence. Medium doesn’t choose to silence poor quality content, it chooses to build up exceptional stories. The staff works tirelessly to ensure that readers are consistently presented with the best of the best.
Medium delivers great writing and an amazing experience for the reader in three ways. First, the editorial team curates content and promotes a small amount of exceptional stories. Second, its nifty algorithm pushes the best performing pieces to the top of your feed and lets the subpar stuff sink to the bottom. Finally, an unwavering dedication to a beautiful and simple design allows the reader to focus on the content, not the aesthetics. Medium’s product is unfathomably complex, they just do a great job of hiding that complexity from visitors.
Distinguishing casual fans from engaged devotees highlights groups that should be targeted more closely, as they are more likely to purchase products and services and evangelize your brand. Medium allows you to peal back the onion, and expose a part of you or your company that people can deeply identify with, making them more loyal more likely to buy, share, or recommend.
Many may wonder how Medium could eventually become one of the tech giants. A skeptic may inquire, “How many people really write content?” It’s not so much about appealing to current authors, it is about encouraging and harvesting new ones.
Medium represents a fundamental shift in the way that we consume and create content. It’s a beacon of hope in a literary world that’s been ruthlessly exploited and relentlessly optimized for clicks and shares.
By breaking down the barriers to entry for the average digitarian, Medium fosters a creative environment for any writing noob to explore. The writers of Medium are not always seasoned pros migrating from other blogging platforms, they are often fresh authors publishing their words publicly for the first time.
Stories written in the heat of the moment when emotions are high are often the best. You should skip wasting time picking a subdomain and a template, and strike while the iron is hot. Crucially, Medium’s sign up process takes only seconds, and then your words and images can reach the world. Since there’s no need to register a domain, evaluate a near infinite number of templates and designs, and launch a website, it means you won’t miss out on any creative opportunity. You just write.
“If it’s on a whim, that whim is killed the moment you’re forced to find a unique sub domain and find a template.” — @ev
Medium intends to radically lower the barrier to entry for writing and reaching an audience, and it’s already proven it’s willingness to overcome financial and engineering hurdles to do so.
“Not everyone wants to write a 30 second commercial. Sometimes you really have a two-hour movie or a six-day miniseries locked inside of you.” — @squidlord
Medium is the great friend who lets you ramble on, only interjecting when the time is right. The one who trusts that you will make a valid, well contrived point if given the chance.
In the early days of the web, blogs were isolated and independent islands. Medium is like Venice, Italy — stories are connected with just a short bridge. In the treacherous sea that is the web, it’s comforting to know that Medium is a safe harbor. Protection from trolls, protection from emptiness, and protection from being overwhelmed.
It’s only a function of time before more and more people of the web add a long form mechanism to their digital toolkit. Medium will be that tool. Twitter gave us 140 characters to become journalists and Instagram gave us a lens to become photographers, but Medium gives us a printing press to become writers.
Medium is still in the early days, and good things happen to brave pioneers. New platforms have historically provided opportunity for early adopters, and Medium will not be an exception. Google Adwords, Facebook, and Twitter all provided unmatched opportunities for marketers and advertisers before they matured and were flooded and saturated. Clicks that cost $0.05 years ago are $3.00 today.
Medium is growing fast with no signs of slowing down soon, so it’s prudent to stake a claim now.
How It’s Different
Medium is something that may look familiar, but a quick peek under the hood shows how different it is than analogous publishing platforms like Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and Blogger. Simply put, Medium is one hundred times better. Here is why:
- It’s easy to compose.
What’s the biggest reason more people don’t publish online? Doing so seems daunting. Medium’s editor is free, and the beautiful, simple, and intuitive design evokes creativity and productivity. By minimizing distractions and implementing strategic constraints, you are able to pump out more content of higher quality.
“Sometimes constraint — well designed constraint — is opportunity for both reader and author.” — @andrealaue
Medium is the easiest way possible to publish anything on the web; it is entirely free, takes all of twenty seconds to set up, and has zero maintenance. There are no overzealous sidebars, plug-ins, or widgets. You don’t need to set up any formatting, fonts, and layouts that only tend to overcomplicate things. You’ll never need to write a single line of code nor will you have to customize anything.
Since Medium is also responsive, your story will automatically look terrific on any device or screen size, be it phone, tablet, or computer.
2. You can get a ton of people to read your writing.
You may love to write, but having something valuable to say with nobody to listen to it is demoralizing. When nobody is actually reading your work, it can frustrate you to the point of giving up. Alternative platforms may help you publish, but they don’t really do much after that.
Medium has built a system that allows quality content to rise to the top. Write exceptional stuff and an audience will find, read, and share it. You can leverage Medium’s size to help your writing expand much further than it would on your own blog or website.
3. It’s a forum.
Traditionally, blogs have been ways for writers to get up on a soapbox and speak, with any and all comments suppressed and pushed down to the bottom. Medium has designed a platform that encourages meaningful interaction between readers and writers. Your story is only the beginning of a concept that can be elaborated on by others. Readers can easily leave in-line notes, and with one click can generate their own long form response that will be linked.
4. It kills the reverse chronological paradigm.
Since the early days of blogging, posts have been time stamped and displayed in order of when they were published, starting with the most recent. Even social products like Twitter and Facebook inherited this architecture. Notifications and feed-refreshing products have conditioned us to consume content that is the freshest.
Older content, despite it’s merits or quality, inherently loses importance as time goes on, and we place a skewed favoritism for the new and the recently published. Medium aims to flip this on it’s head and keep content relevant if it’s good, regardless of it’s age.
5. You are free to write about various topics.
Generally speaking, blogs usually need to have a voice and an overarching theme. Medium allows individual stories to find the right audience, so it’s not quite as important to make sure there is a common thread between all of your musings. It’s not peculiar or uncommon to see a writer have stories with as subjects as diverse as technology one moment, and viniculture the next. You wouldn’t expect a good friend to keep all of her thoughts and dialogues under a theme, so why expect that out of a writer?
There is no constraint of continuation and no requirement that your stories need to start where the last one left off. They just stand on their own, carrying enough weight and stability that they don’t need to be propped up by anything else or put into context.
6. There is no pressure to keep publishing.
Since Medium doesn’t place an emphasis on the reverse-chronological order, it means that stories remain relevant even as time marches on. When you haven’t published anything in a while, it doesn’t create a cause for concern like it would on a blog. As a writer, you are left to publish only when you feel genuinely motivated or inspired, not because you are under the pressure of a calendar.
Who’s On It
While Medium’s first adopters were primarily tech early adopters and those with a deep passion for all things Internet, by virtue of it’s own growth, Medium is inevitably spilling over into many different demographics and now has a diverse stack of users. Even @LeoDiCaprio and @WhiteHouse are on it.
Medium quickly gained a reputation for it’s high-caliber contributors. If I haven’t yet convinced you that Medium is awesome-sauce, perhaps the following roster of current active writers lights a fire under you.
Companies and organizations as diverse as General Catalyst Partners, General Assembly, Stanford Magazine, and the Sydney Opera House have set up shop here. Starbucks, UNICEF, PBS Newshour, Intuit, O’Reilly Media are all sharing stories. President Obama, Elon Musk, and best selling author Walter Isaacson (he wrote the book about Steve Jobs) are on here. Even NFL players and politicians are publishing their words on Medium.
One University school newspaper even decided to ditch their printed paper altogether, and publish exclusively on Medium. Before his passing, New York Times media critic David Carr used Medium as a way to publish the syllabus for his graduate journalism class. His students were required to publish their stories within the group’s collection.
Even with these name drops, it still comes down to the most important writer — you. People just like you, who don’t have household names, are contributing and making a difference. Medium isn’t a place only reserved for those who want another channel to leverage their existing followers or celebrity status. It’s a place for people from all walks of lives.
Elements
Signing Up
When you create a Medium account, you can do so with either your existing Twitter or Facebook account. You must use one of these two services; you can’t create an account with just an email. When you sign up with Twitter, you may be prompted to follow @Medium on Twitter. I recommend doing so in order to stay updated with any announcements.
I also suggest that you connect both Facebook and Twitter to your Medium account. By doing so, your friends on Facebook and/or your followers on Twitter that also have Medium accounts will be added to your Medium network. By combining your two digital presences, your audience will most likely increase in size.
You can not create a Medium account for your business using your Facebook business page. Only your personal Facebook page will work here. (That is of Facebook’s restriction, not Medium’s.) I recommend to use your company’s Twitter account instead.
Rest assured, Medium will never change your Facebook or Twitter profile, send tweets or updates you didn’t initiate, or follow and friend other accounts. Medium utilizes Twitter and Facebook access permissions primarily so that you can tweet and share stories from you and others without leaving Medium.
Pro Tip: Never delete a Twitter or Facebook account that you use to log in to your Medium account. If you do, you won’t be able to log in to Medium, and you’ll have to delete your account and start over. That would be awful.
Your Profile
Just like Twitter, your identity starts with the “@” symbol. Your profile address is your @name, preceded by www.medium.com/. My handle is @gregmuender, and my profile URL is www.medium.com/@gregmuender.
Note: Don’t forget the “@” before your name. This is different than how Twitter URLs are formatted.
Pro Tip: If your name is taken, do not add anything before it, only after. It makes discovery incredibly challenging for your followers. For example, if @fatberry were not available, I would do @fatberryapp, not @getfatberry.
For those viewing your profile, they are going to see a bit of basic information about you including your follower count, your background image, and links to your Twitter and/or Facebook profiles. If you own or edit a Publication, visitors will see a link to that.
Your recommendation history will also show up for all to see. Be cognizant with what you recommend because it is publicly available. Viewers will also see your most recently published stories, and your most recommended post of all time, independent of how old the story is.
However, you can display a specific story to the top of your profile instead of the default “Most Recommended.” Think of it like Twitter’s pinned tweet function. It’s called “Featured”, and using it will prominently display a specific story above all other stories at the top of your profile. To do so, click the chevron (downward arrow) below a story’s title on your profile page and select “Feature At The Top Of Your Profile.” Now you’ll see it at the tippy top, under the “Featured Story” Heading. You can stop featuring at any time by selecting the chevron again, and the top of your profile will revert to “Most Recommended.”
To change a background image, your bio, or your avatar, click “edit” in the top right corner of of your profile page. Remember to click “save” to update.
Your Bio
A lot of people underestimate the importance of a descriptive yet succinct bio. Readers that find their way to your profile page are going to decide whether or not to follow you very quickly, and you need to show them the value you will provide if they make the commitment. Unless you have a well defined personal brand, don’t be overly creative or abstract with your bio — it could hurt you. Instead, briefly explain the things that you write about, or what your followers can expect. If you are associated with any popular brands or companies, list those, too. If they are on Medium, include their handles. People make snap decisions, leverage the familiarity of well known brands to encourage people to follow you.
Bad Bio: Lover, not a fighter. I write words like Kobe shoots hoops. Living the big life in a small city. One day at a time.
Good Bio: Author of Best Book Ever (www.bestbookever.com), @harvard class of 2010, previously @starbucks. I write about tech, cars, and on the life of a writer.
If you run a business, startup, or company, your bio presents a great spot for a plug of the name, website, and Medium handle, if applicable. If you are building a Medium account for a business, the URL in the bio is a must.
Pro Tip: When creating a profile for a company, authors and contributors should be included in the bio. It makes it more personal.
Followers
As you’ve perhaps grown accustomed to with Twitter, following is used in Medium as a way for readers to keep in touch with the writers and publications that interest them most. As a writer, it’s important to build up your follower base.
A healthy follower count means that each of your new stories hits a receptive audience every time you publish. As your audience grows, each post will get more traction sooner and ramp up faster, making your story’s reach far wider. All else being equal, the higher your follower count, the easier it is to get traction for an early story.
It’s no coincidence that those with high numbers of followers consistently make the Top 100. Writers like @garyvee and @jason have instant exposure to 55,000 and 34,000 followers, respectively. Their followers provide critical early traction by recommending and sharing, which helps the stories move up within the network.
Readers may not follow you after reading only one of your stories, but if they are return to your work and consistently find valuable and or entertaining content, they are more likely to hop on board.
Medium’s community members reward quality content as much as the platform does. Exceptional stories get read and shared more often, which leads to more people checking out your profile page, and ultimately more followers. Once they follow you, they’ll continue to read your stuff, so long as you keep your quality up. It’s a powerful cycle that you can take advantage of.
When I was first getting onboard the Twitter bandwagon, I would to reach out to those with thousands of followers. I was curious how they racked up such a following, and I was seeking an easy, one sentence instruction.
I never got one.
I learned time and time again is that there is no silver bullet. It takes time to build a quality audience. Anyone can go buy 10,000 followers for $50, but that type of audience isn’t valuable.
The same applies to Medium. While there are things you can do to optimize for the amount of followers you gain, you have to earn them through quality content. It’s a long term play.
Medium is unrivaled when it comes to finding the right audience for whatever you have to say. The stories here are connecting souls, and the culture sets the bar pretty high around these parts. Meet or exceed that standard and you’ll be rewarded with followers who are eager to read your next story.
Don’t Follow For The Follow
On Twitter, many people follow others with the intent that reciprocity will take place. You may be tempted to do this on Medium, but I advise you to reconsider before you spend time doing so. Users of Medium do not get any in-app notifications when you follow them, so they aren’t necessarily any more likely to follow you back. The mechanics just simply aren’t the same as they are on Twitter.
However, readers that you follow will get notified via email, if their “Email social activity” is allowed. This is set to “on” by default, but it’s difficult to get insight on what percentages of readers have left it there.
Pro tip: Run an experiment yourself. If a healthy amount of folks are following you back, you may wish to pursue the strategy, as long as you keep monitoring it.
It’s important to protect your ratio of followers to those you are following. If you follow 1,000 people, yet only have 100 followers, you are less likely to obtain new followers. Either subconsciously or consciously, readers may consider your account spammy.
Highlights
Highlights are a quick, easy, and fun way to recognize a particular section of text. Readers can highlight parts of a story to show support, or writers can highlight bits of their own story to add emphasis.
When multiple readers highlight the same text, it’s called “piling on”.
As a writer, you should care about highlights. They act as signals that particular parts of your story were really liked. When more and more readers pile on, you have written something that people really identify with.
As parts of your story get highlighted, and especially as they get piled on, it’s important to note that the text will receive extra special attention. You may want to keep your eye on to those parts, and ensure that the added highlights have not changed the message in some inadvertent way.
It’s completely acceptable to highlight your own writing. Maybe you really, really want to emphasize a point. That’s totally understandable.
Notifications
Keeping up do date with the happenings on Medium is a powerful way to have your finger on the pulse of the ecosystem. You will know what is popular right now, which may even inspire you to write a story or response to another.
An engaged writer is in tune with the action on her stories, drafts, publications, and notes. Medium can send you all types of updates via email, so long as you allow them via your settings page. When starting out, you should allow all emails to come in. As you fine tune which ones are useful — and which ones aren’t— you can prune back the frequency.
On your settings page, there are three toggles for email frequency.
“Activity on your content” emails are related to your stories, including when users recommend your story or leave a note. If a story that you have submitted to a publication gets published, you will get an email. As a publication owner or editor, you’ll also get notified if someone submits a story to your publication for review.
“Social activity” emails are sent when people follow you on Medium. This is a useful way to see what types of people are interested in hearing more from you. Take it to the next level by personally thanking each person that follows you by sending a tweet to them.
Lastly, you can select daily, weekly, or none for “reader and writer digests” emails. These are a personalized digest of new stories written and recommended by people you follow, along with monthly writer digests for the stories you have published.
You can also receive certain notifications via the iPhone or iPad app. Just like emails, start with the highest frequency of notifications, and trim from there as needed.
Home Page
This is default landing page for those who are coming to Medium, whether they are logged in or not. It is where consumption and creation generally starts.
For those that are signed in to their Medium account, they are presented with their personalized reading list. This is generated by the users and Publications that a reader follows, what their friends on Twitter and Facebook are publishing and recommending on Medium, and a sampling of staff picks.
Total Time Reading
“…in a world where people have infinite choices, [time spent reading is] a pretty good measure if people are getting value.” — @ev
Forget about page views and clicks. Medium has been very vocal that they emphasize one metric more than any other — “Total Time Reading”, commonly abbreviated as TTR. This is measured as the total time that all of your readers spent reading your story in aggregate. (e.g. 2,300 minutes of TTR). It’s the most accurate indication of quality and engagement.
The TTR data can be analyzed in a number of interesting ways by the team at Medium (e.g. new stories vs. old & logged-in vs. logged-out). This will likely be used to learn about readers and their interactions with stories. Perhaps insights can be uncovered on how to encourage users to finish a story, or whether it’s best to have a user read more of a short story (e.g. 2 minutes of a 3 minute post), or less of a longer story (e.g. 6 minutes of an 11 minute story).
It’s crucial to adopt this way of prioritization now, because ultimately it will be intimately aligned with the function and form of the platform as it matures. Medium is converging at the intersection of TTR and quality. Adopt that mentality, and you’ve set yourself up for a nice future.
