One Million Views Later

What I’ve learned in my first year on Medium

A special thanks to my fifty stadiums-worth of readers. (Photo by Tim Gouw)

Last night I was checking my Medium stats before bed and realized I was about to cross a major milestone in my writing career: At some point during the night, I would hit 1+ million views on Medium.

It’s been a good first year on the platform:

• 80,000 words published (that’s a book!)
• 94 articles published
• 1,000,000 views
• 308,000 reads
• 111,400 claps
• 16,500 fans
• 6,600 subscribers
• Currently a top writer in Politics, Finance, Future, Life, Culture, and Economy

Whether you’re just starting out on your writing journey, or you’ve got hundreds of articles and several books under your belt like I do, I hope this post provides tactical advice and encouragement on your literary adventure.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

I have no idea how Medium works

None.

• Some posts pay me <$1 per hour of member reading time, sometimes it’s 10X that amount.
• Some articles with a high read ratio get half the views of an article with half the read ratio.