Is It Worthwhile to Publish Your Articles Under Medium Publications?

Let’s see what effect it had on me

Mar 31, 2023

Hi, in this article, we’ll look together at how my first 30 days of publishing under publications went. I’ve stayed away from publications for a long time, as it’s relatively easy to get new followers through them because you write certain content, and publications have followers who are interested in just such narrowly focused content, which shoots up your follower count, views, and, theoretically reads.

DALL·E 2022–08–30 09.56.00 — retro photo of a newspaper editorial office with people …buzzing around — AI-generated photo by Onřej Svoboda

I’m glad I took the slower route. Therefore, at least until I got the required number of followers for the affiliate program, I wasn’t inclined to write under publications. Yes, I’m lying to myself now.

I’ve sent a few join requests before, but I wasn’t intended to use them immediately if accepted. It was the fact I was preparing the ground for the next steps in the background. I am currently publishing my articles under several publications.

Which ones are they?

I would like to thank you once again all the publications for accepting me. I really appreciate it.

Since I’m still small in reach, it makes sense for me to publish under multiple publications, but in the future, however, I see it as more of a focus on one particular one that best describes the area I’m most excited to write about. At the moment, that would probably be the Mac O’Clock publication, as most of my content is around Apple devices and their software.

Terms

I publish articles in the form of an average of one a day. Occasionally more will come out, but there is a simple rule, I try to write articles around 4 minutes in length. If I write a shorter one, I will prepare another one simultaneously. In the first period, the articles were published uniformly, around 9:00 am local time.

Later I changed this time to around 3:00 pm. I still write articles from the same areas. I have a daily routine where I devote an hour to writing. For me, it’s a morning ritual where I devote full focus time to commercial projects, then I take a break with the media for an hour and say hello to the folks on discord.

The period before publishing under publications

In this article, I will focus on the 30 days before the first article was added to the publication and the 30 days after. So this is not a direct comparison of months as it was done over a month. Let’s start with the period I last published my articles without adding them under publications.

Period 30 days before publishing under publications | Image courtesy of the author

I had excellent momentum in this period, getting 9721 views in 30 consecutive days. Yes, it’s not much, but for a newbie blogger, such numbers are something :). We get to these figures by taking it to the average number of views, reads, and fans daily.

Views per day = 9721/30 = 324,033
Reads per day = 3888/30 = 129,6
Fans per day = 192/30 = 6.4

The period when I published articles under publications

Now let’s look at what publishing under publications has done to my moment on Medium. On the first day, I got a 77% increase in views from the previous day, so it shifted from 484 to 859. This hasn’t thrown me off balance yet, as my last record from 6/13/2022 was 873 views in a day.

So I took it with a grain of salt, knowing it could have been a natural velocity profile, yet it will tell me the next day. On the following day, my previous all-time high fell, i.e., 2464 views per day, and I couldn’t help wondering if publications have the potential to grow.

Period of 30 days publishing under publications | Image courtesy of author

Considering that I had reached the previous period without publications in the last 30 days to an average of 324 views per day, this increased by 660%. I still didn’t want to believe it but waited to see what would come next.

The following day the number of views was very similar to 2456. After that, the expected drop occurred. This means that I was initially new to these publications, and people wanted to see what I was writing, so they just peeked and returned. There’s nothing wrong with that, so if an article doesn’t interest me, I move on to the next one.

Data for the second period

Let’s look at what this publishing under publications has done to the numbers on my profile. I managed to stay around 1000 views per day for almost the entire period, a nice increase over the average for the previous period.

Views per day = 36390/30 = 1213
Reads per day = 11183/30 = 372,766
Fans per day = 441/30 = 14,7

Comparison of periods

As you can see directly from the numbers, after publishing under publications, I shifted from an average of 324 views per day to 1213. In reads, it shifted from an average of 129.6 to 327.76, and the number of fans also increased from 6.4 per day to 14.7.

Thanks to the greater reach of my articles, I have also encountered the first internet trolls. If this happens to you, I recommend you not waste your energy on them and spend your time writing another article.

However, this growth would not be possible without you readers, as the fact that you read the articles I write motivates me to write more articles. Watching the stats on Medium is very addictive.

What it did to the “strength” of my profile

I see the conversion from views to reads as very important, I don’t see it completely, but I see it as if articles are only displayed, but no one reads them. As a result, meaning a significant loss. We do a simple calculation: divide the number of reads and views and multiply by 100 to get the percentage difference between these values.

For a period without publications, this is

3888/9721 * 100 = 39,99%

For the period with publications, it is

11183/36390 * 100 = 30,73%

So we can say that by starting to publish under publications, I have weakened the “strength” of my profile, but we also need to look at another thing: the average number of views per day with and without publications.

Average views per day without publications = 324
Average views per day with publications = 1213

So we can also calculate how the average number of views per day went up

1213/324 = 3,74x

So what do these calculations tell us?

Without publications, I had a stronger profile in terms of conversion of views to reads but much fewer views, so with publications, I have a weaker conversion. Ultimately, it is more beneficial for my profile because many more people visit it.

Why am I sharing these calculations with you?

Since I am new to writing, I like sharing my insights that can help others grow. While I’m on the subject of sharing insights, I can recommend Mark Ellis’ ebook to everyone; I’ve read it several times myself, and the advice Mark shares there works, then it’s up to you whether you stick with writing or not.

What you should expect next time

In the next article from this area, I would look at how much the first month of the affiliate program brought me when I had it for 2/3 months, and then we would look at the whole month when I had the affiliate program and published articles under publications. I think you’ll be as surprised with the results as I am.