By Jeremy Ettinghausen, Innovation Director, BBH London & BBH Labs
A little over a month ago we published our first post on Medium, the first platform we are testing out in our Publishing Laboratory. Since that first piece a further five have been added, for a grand total of 23 minutes of reading as calculated by Medium’s proprietary algorithm.
All combined, our stories have received 3187 views and 1625 reads, with a read ratio of a touch over 53% which strikes us as pretty acceptable. Our most recommended story received 28 recommends, our least popular was liked just eight times, and we got the odd comment and highlight here and there.
Over the same period we’ve published five posts on our trusty stalwart, the BBH Labs blog, a couple of them versions of the Medium posts and three unique to the blog. 4,372 users spent an average of 1.31 minutes on the blog, over 5201 sessions. We had a couple of trackbacks, no comments and, of course, no likes, since this isn’t a metric that we register or measure on the blog.
So, if my shaky maths is correct, people spent a little over 37,ooo minutes reading our posts on Medium as opposed to just under 8000 minutes on the Labs blog. Of course we don’t know whether the time spent on the Labs blog was spent pouring over every em dash and colon — for all we know the blog might have been open in another browser tab while our visitor looked at cat videos on facebook.
What can we take away from this? Well, firstly Medium is a lovely, clean writing platform, a real pleasure to use. It brings a simple (but limited) interface together with an immersive writing experience that does encourage the words to flow. And clearly, Medium is a platform where people come to read — both desktop and mobile versions are optimised for absorbing text, as opposed to imagery or video or audio.
Medium is also most definitely a good platform for sharing content in our area of interest — the intersection of culture and technology and brands. But we have to ask ourselves whether Michael Wolff’s observation about twitter — that it’s a forum for media people to talk about media — is also true of Medium, right now. Maybe Medium is simply a nicer place for our twitter followers to read on, than a platform we can use to reach a new audience with new content.
Lastly, during the course of this first phase of our publishing experiment, Medium underwent a major rehaul of its writing tools, logo and feature set (custom domains!). This is again a reminder that when you are publishing on someone else’s platform you are a guest in their home, using their tools at their whim and as they allow. Medium is lovely to write and read on, and for the dozens of new followers who are joining us there each day we will continue to add to our presence there, but again we are reminded of the importance of having somewhere on the world wide web that we can call home.
Originally published at bbh-labs.com on October 22, 2015.
