Unlocking the Secrets of Medium's Staff Picks: An Analysis
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Understanding Medium's Staff Picks
Getting your story featured in Medium's Staff Picks is akin to winning a lottery. While boosts already enhance a writer's visibility, making it to the Staff Picks section is the ultimate accolade, validating your efforts and broadening your audience reach. Yet, the criteria for selection are often shrouded in mystery. Beyond the editors' expertise and intuition, what distinguishes one piece from the multitude of others?
To unravel this, I analyzed 580 staff-picked articles to uncover underlying trends and patterns. The results were both unexpected and enlightening.
Disclaimer: For this analysis, I simply navigated through Medium's Staff Picks pages without applying any search filters. I excluded stories authored by "Medium Staff" or those published in "Medium Blog" to focus solely on independent writers. While 580 stories offer some insights, they represent a limited sample size. Notably, current events and trends can significantly influence story popularity.
Basic Statistics
Let's start by examining some basic metrics from the analyzed stories.
Most articles typically require around 7–8 minutes for reading.
On average, stories include about 6 images (with 4 being the median), with the highest count reaching 190—an anomaly from a photography-centric post by Adam Scotti.
Each story averages 5.72 headings (h1 and h2), with a median of 4. The most prolific authors included Liza Donnelly (57K followers, 9 stories), Allison Wiltz (56K followers, 6 stories), and Robert Roy Britt (238K followers, 6 stories). Other notable authors have follower counts of 6.4K and 204K, respectively.
Engagement Insights: Surprisingly, these metrics don’t significantly correlate with engagement levels.
Reading time doesn’t correlate with votes or comments, nor do the number of images or headings. A logical relationship exists where more headings contribute to increased reading time. However, there is a strong correlation between votes and comments: higher votes lead to more comments, and vice versa.
Interestingly, a slight correlation was found between whether a story is "Member only" and its engagement metrics.
The Paywall Dilemma
Although not a formal criterion for selection, the distribution between free and member-only stories is noteworthy.
Among the analyzed stories, 57.6% were behind Medium’s paywall, while 42.4% were accessible for free. This trend warrants deeper exploration for writers aiming to boost their engagement.
Does a paywall drastically alter engagement? The answer is no.
Where to Publish?
Should you seek to publish your story within a publication? It seems logical to assume that publishing elsewhere would enhance visibility.
Medium offers a curated selection of publications that can help stories gain Boost through visibility. However, the data shows a surprising distribution regarding where staff-picked stories are published.
Indeed, a higher percentage of picked stories (56.6% vs 43.4%) originate from publications. Nevertheless, Medium's editorial team appears to prioritize quality and engagement over the publication source.
Further Analysis of Publications
To dig deeper, I ranked publications based on three criteria: post count, vote count, and comment count.
Among the 580 stories analyzed, two publications consistently led: UX Collective (469K followers, 16.4%) and Human Parts (316K followers, 13.2%). Notably, Human Parts accounts for a significant 29.72% of total votes and 25.7% of comments, despite representing only 16.26% of total posts.
Surprisingly, Middle-Pause, with only 2.6K followers, ranks second for both comments (12.03%) and votes (10.56%) with just 3.25% of total posts.
The top 5 publications are:
- UX Collective
- Human Parts
- Middle-Pause
- ZORA
- The Startup
Trending Tags: The most commonly used tags in these publications include:
- Human Parts: Philosophy, Culture, Personal Essay, Relationships, Mental Health
- UX Collective: UX, Design, User Experience, Usability, Product Design
- Middle-Pause: Life Lessons, Aging, Women, Menopause, Personal Essay
Most Engaging Tags
Analyzing tags reveals fascinating insights. The five most frequently used tags were:
- Technology (52)
- Culture (45)
- Life (45)
- Design (42)
- Life Lessons (34)
While technology-related publications appear in the top 10, "Technology" ranks lower in engagement, coming in sixth with an average of 5,370 votes and 88 comments. In contrast, "Life Lessons" tops the engagement chart with an average of 8,878 votes and 127 comments, despite being the fifth most used tag.
Writing Tips for Success
So, is there a secret formula for getting picked? Unfortunately, the answer is no. However, the insights gathered offer valuable patterns and tendencies.
The analysis could delve deeper into specific factors like tag combinations, title types, and story formats to uncover more nuances.
Here's what can be drawn from the data:
- The publication status appears to have minimal impact on engagement. While more stories from publications were picked (55.7% vs 44.3%), the difference seems less significant over time.
- Similarly, the paywall status didn’t notably influence engagement, with a higher number of "member-only" stories not consistently attracting more attention.
- If you’re considering publication, stories focusing on human experiences generally garner more engagement.
- Tags related to life experiences and writing tend to resonate more with audiences.
Conclusion
There’s no guaranteed method to ensure your story is selected by Medium’s editorial team. However, I hope these insights illuminate some key factors while alleviating the uncertainties that writers often face.
Focus on crafting high-quality, engaging stories first. Once you have that foundation, experiment with different strategies, and who knows? Your next piece might just earn the coveted 'Staff Pick' badge.
Happy writing!
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