Medium Metrics for writers and publications
and how to benchmark your writing and publishing metrics
Publishing is certainly more about sharing news, ideas, knowledge than it is about the number of followers, users, readers, or any other audience metrics but writing and knowing that many people like you have read what has been written can be very comforting. it is better for the writer and publisher to not care about the numbers at the beginning of the writing and publishing journey because they will not be important but to focus on consistency, frequency, and improvement of the quality of the content published. Then if this article shows some numbers that are not going in your favor because it shows like you are not performing well please don't consider them like that and continue to share your stories because the sharing part is what is most important in this connected world we are living in. Because I thought that Medium writers, publishers, and users need more granular quantitative data about the experience they are getting with medium, I am sharing some quantitative facts that I have gathered while waiting for this tech-enabled platform that will help you get more quantitative facts about online publishing.
Before going into more granular analysis, let’s recapitulate some global metrics about Medium this publishing startup founded by the co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams. Medium has over 60 million monthly active users and 65,000 of them are writing articles on this platform what represents…% of the total userbase.
Coverage of Topics
As there are 65,000 medium writers like me we could compute the number of occurrences per writer by just dividing the numbers that you have discovered above by this total number of writers what will give us the charts below
Armed with these publishing metrics you can know whether you are below or above average if you have the number of occurrences of these words in your own article. If I take my medium profile as an example here is what we get
I have written and published more than 500 hundred articles and you can see that for these specific keywords I am way above average in terms of the number of occurrences but writing is for sure not about counting how many times we have written a word but for sharing interesting stories and ideas and I hope that it is what I am doing.
Coverage of Tech Companies
in this section, I will be diving into the coverage of some big tech companies by Medium. It is good to remember that medium is not about tech at all and there are millions of articles on Medium and all of them are not about technology at all.
The following chart shows you the number of occurrences of the names of 10 tech companies.
Like how Google is holding a monopoly in the search engine industry, it feels like google is also the most cited tech company on Medium a so big difference that excluding it in the set of companies will make the bar chart more clear.
if we delete Google of this representative set given its overweighted number of occurrences of its name in Medium’s article here is the chart that you get
You could remark that SalesForce has a very low coverage on Medium while being a very important and big tech company if you are a writer interested in getting readers by focusing on a niche topic you could choose to write on purpose about SalesForce. In the next paragraph, I will be comparing my medium profile with the average writer profile. I could already tell you that it is the second time I write SalesForce in my +500 articles.
As we have done while analyzing the coverage of topics like startup, marketing and Engineering we will see what the average per writer are
and if I benchmark myself to this average hypothetical writer here is the chart that we get
You could see that for each tech company I am above the average and for Microsoft and Amazon, I am far above the average because I am have been writing a lot about marketplace as confirmed by the datapoint for Marketplace of the chart that compares my writing about a topic to this typical average writer. As a reminder here is this chart
Example of some Tech influencers
I used to say that the internet is more about people than computers then will finish this article with a brief analysis of the coverage of some key tech personalities who I call Tech-Influencers. Also, please let me say my apologies to all the women of the world because I have completely forgotten to put into the basket women tech influencers. Normally I would have taken 5 women and 5 men but missed this completely, hope that these articles I am writing about women in tech through the Greyio Heart Experiment will pay for this mistake to be forgiven.
For the tech influencers here are the charts, I will let you see them and draw your own conclusion from them all I can say is that Elon Musk like Google for The tech companies part is way ahead of the others.
With these two charts above you could clearly see that Elon Musk is leading the peloton of tech influencers then I thought that excluding his name from the dataset could help you see better the performance of the others. Here are the charts of the coverage of some tech influencer names in Medium
Going to let you benefit from such kind of analysis through a tech-enabled platform, if you are interested to be a beta tester please fill this form.
PS: For honoring women and for fixing my mistake of not introducing women influencers into the list of tech influencers, here are charts about Gender in Medium. I was surprised to know that like for my writing the word Women is most written in Medium. Here it is
Here is a reminder, Chart about the number of occurrences of gender in my writings which was in this article titled Blogs as a source of good Hire signal.
