
Publishing on Medium, with the stats they don't make obvious - KentBeck
https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/publishing-on-medium-b1f788c42634
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mellosouls
_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.

~~~
workthrowaway
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.

~~~
capableweb
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.

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saagarjha
> 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.

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

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amdelamar
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.

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llamataboot
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.

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

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

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

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itcrowd
> 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)

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

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Mike_Davison
Behind a paywall of course.

~~~
SamBam
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.

