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Comment by ukulele | Hacker News Reader

Built-in audience of readers

I would be really curious how much of an effect that has. I have only ever gone to Medium because I followed a link to a post. Never because I was browsing Medium and found another article to read.

I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.

A friend has a blog -- about the history of labor & work -- that he often cross-posts to Medium.

He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours.

Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.

Could these 30,000 reads be from bots/crawlers? Medium has all the incentives to boost up the number of reads, don't they? I'd wanna measure engagement metrics outside their domain instead.

Yeah, I'd be interested in knowing this too. Seems unlikely that a niche topic would generate so many human views in a short period of time. I do CMS management for a national nonprofit website with a few million hits each month, and 30k views for a single article with no promotion strategy seems...unlikely.

Our Google Analytics filters out bots and crawlers, which do significantly inflate pageview stats.

That particular article wasn't a niche though, it was about the so-called Millennial work ethic, Hannah Arendt's notion of labor vs work, "bullshit jobs", and so on.

I post on Medium. I don't really promote anything I write. I get around 50-100 views per thing I write. Why do I do it? Well honestly I have no where else in mind. I don't have any one looking for my blog, I'm not really going to spam Hacker News or Reddit, or Discord rooms with links to get organic outreach.

I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me.

Medium can tell you where your readers come from.

Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ

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