Medium Boosting Revealed

the sad truth I've uncovered

Medium has developed a feature called boosting as part of its revamp this year, this feature is supposed to help authors promote their articles based on algorithms, but I seem to have got it all wrong. After introducing this new feature, I understood that the moment you share your articles on social media and it gives you a sufficient peak in views, it should automatically include you in boosting, i.e. promotion through Medium newsletters, on the main page or more for other articles. Since I was interested in this feature, I decided to experiment.

Within this experiment, I almost randomly chose 12 articles, well, not so random. I had five articles pinned to my profile - i.e. five older but successful articles, plus five articles from the last week I've been writing and two random newer articles from fellow TechLife publications. So in total, 12 articles were involved in the experiment. Since I don't understand social media from a marketing perspective, I decided to delegate this activity for a few dollars via a random freelancer from UPWORK.

I inquired and paid $36.75 for 370 shares on various social networks. The overall impact on the articles was that each piece involved in the experiment got between 1-3k claps. From the perspective of a view, there was a peak. From a reads perspective, virtually nothing happened, or at least it was lost in the data for me. And it brought in a few new loyal followers. This whole experience was very valuable, as it allowed me to say calmly that medium boosting is purely manual based on manual assignments by media curators.

What does this mean for you as a writer? Suppose you want at least a chance that your articles will be selected for boosting. In that case, you need to first write under one of the tags where it is possible to get a badge or write under a larger publication where the editors are likely to be curators, i.e. people who can recommend an article for boosting. Keep in mind, however, that curation is about recommending other people's articles, and unfortunately, I've also encountered a case where the author recommended themselves.

Furthermore, if you recommend an article for boost, don't forget to write what made you interested in the article and why you are recommending it. If you get what I did, you will be falsely accused of self-promotion when you recommend an article by someone with almost the same name (Jakub Jancik), then defend yourself because such falsehood will block you from growing.