My Medium Stats are Trolling Me
Photo by Alex Motoc on Unsplash
January 18 2020
Yes this is a story about stats. But it’s not one of those stories I promise. I need your help.
There I was, going along slow and steady on this wonderful platform that none of us whatsoever would ever think of having any misgivings about. After a relatively bare patch of publishing (because, you know, life), my stats had correspondingly stagnated; for the entirety of the second half of December I had not cracked over double figure views for a day. Feel better? You are welcome.
Not good enough, I said to myself. Time to lift my game: not by coming up with amazing ideas for new stories of course, but by piecing together ideas that had for months being lying dormant — something akin to digging a frozen meal out of the fridge you hadn’t eaten because you knew it wasn’t good enough, but adding some extra veggies and a miscellaneous form of protein and serving it like it was fresh off the stove.
It was one of these stories that has me in a kerfuffle. It’s not an overly noteworthy story, certainly not one of my best. You needn’t read it, and to prove it I’m not even going to provide a link.
But the day after it was published, in one of my mid-morning stats checks that quite often feels like an act of self-flagellation, I saw a confounding spike in my previously plateaued landscape of green columns. I had 20 views! Which was quite exciting until I realised this was accompanied by solitary, singular read. That’s right: how many of you can say you have had a story in the hallowed recesses of 5% read ratio. That takes some skill.
The next time I checked (let’s say an hour, even though it almost certainly wasn’t that long) it had somehow doubled. 40 views. Hey, I realised: I must have been curated! My obvious writing prowess had for so long been overlooked by the clueless and soulless Medium bots (just joking obviously) that I had forgotten what this felt like.
But no. No curation. Just lots of views. Still very few reads, still absolutely zero claps, but so many views. Too many, even. Something smelt fishy.
The range of emotions I felt over the next two days as the view count continued to rise like an old person viagra joke you can fill in for yourself was quite overwhelming (it wasn’t, but let’s go with it).
SO many views… 200 in a single day! So few reads (it has now, mercifully, crept up over 20%). Who were these mystery people, and where have you been up until now.
Well, as it turns out, there were no claps (I lie, I have one clap but it came from the publication editor so…) because a full 3% of these views had come internally from dear Medium readers. Order was somewhat restored, my ego was checked, my dreams of financial dominion squashed once again. My stats were being stacked by penniless, redundant, pitiful external clicks.
So perhaps I had somehow, despite a lack of curation, snuck into every second Medium Daily Digest? But no, because hardly any of these external clicks actually came from that seemingly slightly arbitrary ‘email, IM and direct’ grouping. Instead, I was getting pumped by this mysterious and, up until now, largely anonymous and entirely confusing ‘Android device (not Medium app)’.
What? Who? So many questions. Not least: why is it necessary to distinguish Android user stats? I know as an Apple user I am superior to other philistines, but I never expected to see it confirmed this blatantly.
But mainly, I am here to ask you dear Medium comrades: what the actual fudge is going on here? Is this a regular occurrence, or are my stats broken? Have I stumbled upon some mysterious formula that opens up stories meant for the safety of Medium eyes only into the scary real world of the internet? Is the Illuminati now keeping tabs on me, even though I live on the other side of the world in the fiery armageddon that currently is Australia? Or more likely, as I suspect by the three finger salute formed by those last three columns, are my Medium stats trolling me?
