My Stats Are Way Down On Medium Recently — Here’s Why
My friends, for the first time in the last 6 months, I actually had a sub-1,000 view day here on Medium last week. Isn’t that nuts?
It’s nuts because you’re probably saying I’m a spoiled brat and that you’d love to get that many views in a day.
I get it, it’s a big number still, but I’m not gonna lie…
I’m worried.
I’m worried for Medium.
Then after 3 days, a lot of thought, and endless hours laying in the fetal position, I began to spot two trends that may or may not explain why my stats are so dang low.
If your stats are low, too, then keep reading.
1. Stats Have Declined Because Of Medium’s Big Announcement
As many of you know, you can now post locked stories to any publication of your choosing. It’s pretty rad, right?
It was so rad that I think everybody started doing it.
Like pot in the 7th grade.
Everybody jumped on the bandwagon and since it’s already known that Medium favors locked stories over free ones, this platform got absolutely saturated with locked stories.
Medium probably didn’t know which ones to promote. The algorithm may be tired. I feel bad for it.
I also saw a huge spike in traffic to my best-performing personal blog post from Google last week. Guess what that article was about?
The Medium Partner Program.
More people are searching Google for information on it recently. People are excited. Frazzled. Keen.
We’re ready to make boatloads of money, and we’re going to get other Medium users to pay for it.
So, in my opinion, that’s number 1.
2. Medium Is Currently Tripling Down On Locked Stories
The Medium algorithm is fascinating to me. And yes, you should be paying attention to it.
Over the last 3 months I’ve seen higher traffic to my posts than ever before. Two went viral. Like, 40k views each viral.
I couldn’t believe it — then it all went to heck again in July.
A locked post I wrote in the beginning of June is trending. I’m getting fans for that out the yin-yang. This just shows me Medium is boosting locked stories more than usual.
And why wouldn’t they?
Their whole business model relies on people becoming members. I get that and I’m totally behind it, but I wonder if it’s having some diminishing effects.
This coupled with the fact that my free story’s reach for last week was cut in half shows me this to be true.
I even re-published a piece that got 5,000 views last year just to see what would happen and it got about 460 over 5 days. Traffic for that has slowed down to a crawl.
I used to get 400+ views on blog posts that I published THAT DAY, now I’m lucky to break 250+.
These are all indications to me of what seems to be happening on Medium.
UPDATE: I published a locked story yesterday to my small publication of 8,000-odd followers and its taken off. 500+ views in 24 hours. I’m on to something here. ⏬
3. Smaller Publications Are Getting More Traffic
I got a bonus one for you… This past week (coincidentally RIGHT after I posted about how Medium should promote more smaller publications), I started getting a boatload of traffic to the Post-Grad Survival Guide.
Granted, one of the posts did go sorta viral, but even that one only went viral AFTER I posted about how smaller pubs need more help. It was like Medium could hear me.
Since then a lot of the published stories at the PGSG have done extremely well. I’m wondering what’s happening to be honest. I don’t know. Do you think Medium heard me?
If you own a smaller publication (less than 20,000 followers) and have seen something similar, please let me know in the responses below.
I Think This Shows Medium Has Never Been Better
So you clicked on this headline because you were scared for Medium. You think that since my stats have plummeted that I now have less confidence in this place..
But here’s what I actually think.
Medium wants to succeed in business, but all of these changes are deeply rooted in their desire to help us succeed, too.
They’re just trying to make us more money. I bet if I published all my posts from last week as locked, I would have seen better statistics.
And what If I published them in smaller publications?
Sheesh, NOW we’re talking. 😉
This is assuming all my assumptions about the algorithm are true. Who knows. I’m just a guy that checks his stats incessantly — don’t believe me.
2 Medium Predictions For The End Of 2018
My predictions?
Less people will post locked stories over the next few weeks. Last week on here we saw an initial flood because people wanted to see what would happen. We did see.
Now that that’s over, and they didn’t make $1,000,000 like they thought they were going to, they’ll get right back to not posting much.
This will effectively de-saturate Medium and make more room for the steady poster’s work to do well whether that be free or locked.
Also, I think the fact that we’re in the middle of summer and people are on vacation may have had something to do with my decline in stats, too. MAY.
However, given Medium’s behavior, I don’t believe they’ll take their foot off the gas-pedal in terms of pushing locked stories more on the homepage. They’re going to continue that. I’d start to post more locked stories (and I will just to do some tests).
Also, I’d EXPERIMENT with publishing under smaller publications just to test the waters. Let’s see if Medium really is pushing them more.
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