Publishing on Medium, with the stats they don't make obvious | Hacker News Reader

Publishing on Medium, with the stats they don't make obvious

medium.com

55 pointsKentBeck17 comments

Every time I publish a post I’m offered a check box, checked by default, that means, “People who haven’t paid Medium may not be able to see this.” Since my goal is to make my writing as widely available as possible, I always uncheck this box.

Hmmmm, didn't realise that was the author's choice (default tbf). I'd assumed some sort of algorithm. Interesting. Kudos for keeping it free, anyway.

surprised by this as well! was it always the case? it is also very interesting to know that names i won't repeat here have chosen not to show their article to a wider audience. good luck with that!

medium is a very strange model, imo, because it feels backwards and honestly against what the internet stood for when it started.

As many for-profit companies, Medium was great when it was the underdog and their goal was "Sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward" and their implementation was to make a distraction free reading with no fuzz.

At one point, it changed (hint: they need to show their investors they can turn a profit) and it's now "Get smarter about what matters to you" with distractions everywhere + the added benefit of being tracked of every scroll/click.

Speaking as a many-time Medium author, Medium uses several UI patterns and incentives to try to get authors to keep this box checked.

The actual text of the box as it appears to us is:

> Allow curators to recommend my story to interested readers. Recommended stories are part of Medium’s metered paywall.

The author gets a link that can bypass the paywall for sharing with friends.

> The traffic from Hacker News is bi-modal. If a post takes off, HN provides 50–60% of the views (along with some delightfully readable comments)(jk).

I guess it’s my turn to add to that: I think this is more like a Pareto distribution than a bimodal one, since there really doesn’t have two modes.

There are two types of people: The 80% that process Pareto distributions as bi-modal, and the 20% that see the gradient.

No, he is right. Unless the post takes off, it never gets into RSS, which means much wider audience.

The author could move to a new blogsite and clone articles to Medium to keep that 18% audience. Treat it more like Twitter/FB/HN instead of the only source.

This has the drawback of more work for the author though. Perhaps there are tools that auto-publish to Medium for you.

I'm still lost with medium publishing.

* Did not check box for my most widely read article that had 15k views, so did not get any money. Clicked link for two other articles (10k and 5k reads), yet $$ for each is super different (I know it depends on /who/ reads, but hard to get a sense of what to expect)

* Still don't exactly know what it means when someone asks me to publish to their publication. Is it exclusive? I know it is distributed.

* Still can't figure out an easy way to separate out accounts (I write creative non-fiction and philosophy and poetry and I also write programming tutorials - not much overlap between the audiences) other than publishing into different publications.

In general I like the Medium model, I like being there as a reader and a writer, but it is hard to figure out the best way to use it.

Why ever check this box if you are not getting paid part of the income for the article.

One of the carrots is that your article is more likely to be recommended to people.

That is an admission, that one should not read Medium, as they show spam instead of relevant information.

> My conclusion from these data is that I shouldn’t bother with Facebook.

I would say the opposite. You have 2k page followers on Facebook (1% of your traffic) and 148k on Twitter (20% of your traffic). That means you need ~7.5k followers on Twitter vs 2k on Facebook to get 1% of your views. Thus, Facebook followers are 3-4 times better for your conversions. If you focus on Facebook, you'll get bigger audiences quicker.

(Assuming everything goes as it has gone so far, etc etc)

The author gets a link that can bypass the paywall for sharing with friend and others.

Behind a paywall of course.

You're saying this article was? It wasn't for me, and the author makes explicit that he never lets his articles be behind the paywall.

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