Read This to Understand Your Medium Stats Page
As a new writer in Medium, I have lots of questions about the statistics in the Stats page. For example,
- What are views and reads? What are their differences? Why do they matter?
- How is the earning calculated? How is it related to the views and reads?
- It seems that there is delay in the update of the earning number. How does it work?
So I read lots of related stories on Medium and these questions are not well answered in many posts. In the comments, I see many people have the same questions as me.
Recently, I carefully read the official explanation in Medium’s help center page, and it clarified a lot of my doubts. Thus, I write this story to explain the questions above. Of course, I encourage you to read the official explanation, which would be more detailed but is also more time-consuming.
The new Medium Partner Program was released on August 1st 2023, which changed a lot compared with the previous version. Medium released the new rules in July 2023, therefore, relevant articles published before this time must include outdated information.
Every time you read stuff about the partner program, stats page, or earning calculation, if it’s published before July 2023, you better skip it!
Views and Reads are Important, But not Everything
The stats page is confusing for me because it seems that the last column “earnings” is calculated based on the first two columns “views” and “reads”. However, there are many other factors involved to calculate the earning, but not shown in the stats page. They include other engagement statistics (clap, highlight, response), follows, Boost Bonus, read-through-rate, etc. I will explain them in the next section.
The earning only comes from the reads statistics, which satisfies these requirements:
paywall + member + logged in + read / listened over 30 seconds
Also by calculating the ratio between reads and views, you can have a general idea of how readers are interested in your story. This is probably the most insightful statistics we can get from the Stats page.
Earning calculation Is Actually Very complicated
This plot shows all the statistics that are related to the earning: engagement points (reading/listening time, clap, highlight, response), follower bonus, Boost Bonus, read-through-rate.
Among these statistics, the follower bonus is less familiar for me. It is basically a multiplier on top of the engagement points when the member reading your story currently follows you or the publication this story is published in.
Since no formula is provided, we do not exactly know how these factors are entangled, so it would be almost impossible to game the system. Besides improving the quality of the story, what seems to be most controllable is the engagement points because we can encourage readers to clap, comment and highlight.
I guess the Medium team do not list all the related statistics in the Stats page because with them and lots of data, we can actually fit a statistical model to mimic their earning calculation formula, which basically exploits the system. It is essential for the Medium’s team that writers should focus on improving their stories’ quality instead of gaming the system.
Earnings Update Have Delays
I have observed that there is delay in the update of the earnings and this is true. The earnings are updated every day. Medium team uses UTC days, and all earnings from activity during midnight UTC to 11:59 PM UTC are calculated and then updated within a few hours.
Takeaway Lessons
- When you have questions about Medium, it is better to look it up in Medium’s help center. It usually does not appear at the top of your Google search results, perhaps because of its bad SEO. However, you can directly start from its home page.
- When reading stories related to Medium rules, pay attention to the time when it was published, and do not refer to stories that were published too early.
- It might be impossible to exploit Medium’s earning calculation, but the engagement points are the easiest factors to consider if you want to earn more from your stories.
At last, I guess it would be a good idea to provide a link to the related explanations in the Stats pages. What do you think? Does this story answer your questions? I am looking forward to receiving your feedbacks!
