She Cracked The Code of Medium’s Mysterious Algorithm

Here’s What I Learned

John Nguyen

5 min readMay 24, 2024

She wanted to share her reflections on her Medium journey, which involved some personal and honest thoughts.

Like many others, she was intrigued by stats and earnings.

December had given her a good feeling with over $800 earned since she started in November.

However, January proved to be a reality check as her earnings nearly halved ($500) despite similar view counts.

This realization led her to some eye-opening discoveries.

Engagement Matters More Than Views on Medium

She discovered that engagement, not views, drives higher earnings on Medium.

Claps, comments, and highlights are the real game-changers

Her most-viewed article had 2.7K views and 2.1K reads but earned only $58.92.

However, her highest-earning article with just 1.6K views and 999 reads made $186.94 — three times more.

The highest-earning piece was 3 minutes long, had 10.2K claps, 199 comments, and was fully highlighted.

In contrast, the most-viewed article was 6 minutes long but had only 849 claps, 22 comments, and some highlights.

Engagement Trumps Views and Length

She realizes that grabbing readers’ attention is more crucial than racking up views. Even an article’s word count doesn’t matter as much as how engaged the audience is with the content.

Earnings Disparity

In December, she accumulated 13.5K views and 8.7K reads, earning $837.88. However, the following month, despite similar metrics of 12.5K views and 8.6K reads, her earnings dipped to $505.76, leaving her puzzled by the discrepancy.

She thinks the main reason for her success was the increased engagement on her articles in December.

She got way more notifications that month.

Another factor was that she engaged more with others too.

So it seems like the algorithm favors passionate engagement, even if it’s not always positive.

Here’s where humility kicked in.

Only about 10% of her work resulted in significant earnings.

The rest?

Well, let’s just say they didn’t set the internet on fire.

But instead of getting discouraged, she sees these ‘flops’ as valuable learning experiences.

Each one teaches her what connects with readers and what falls flat.

So, while others might only showcase their success stories, she wants to be transparent about the 90% of not-so-successful attempts lurking beneath. Her friend Marcus Musick actually inspired her to do this too.

We can see that she has put a lot of effort into creating many valuable posts, even though the success rate is very low.

I mean the rate of viral posts is very low, only about 10%, but she still continues to do it regularly.

By the way,

I also want to share a bit about how to have an attractive title

Even if you have zero copywriting skills.

If your blog posts aren’t getting much attention, it’s possible that readers aren’t compelled enough to click and read them.

I often come across insightful articles from Google searches and Medium, but they have weak titles that fail to stand out among the countless other pieces.

As a reader, I can only consume a limited amount of content — I can’t and shouldn’t read everything. It’s your job as a writer to hook me and make me want to open your article. If you don’t do it, someone else will.

I’ve published over 100 articles, both on and off Medium. This has taught me a crucial lesson I wish I had followed from the start:

It doesn’t matter how great your article is if no one reads it.

First, it needs to be noticed.
Second, it needs to be opened.
Only then might it be read.

Your article’s headline and image are directly responsible for the first step of the reading experience.

Think of your title as a showcase.

The more appealing it looks, the more people will continue their reading journey.

Curiosity drives human actions and decisions.

If you can make people curious, they will likely read your content to satisfy their desire for information.

Admittedly, creating a powerful headline is often more challenging than writing the article itself.

The good news is that the art of headline writing is a science, as multiple research studies have been conducted to determine the components of successful headlines.

BuzzSumo, a powerful marketing tool that helps discover high-performing content across social media and search engines, analyzed over 100 million social headlines. The BuzzSumo team aimed to find the best-performing headlines and common patterns among them.

Their study revealed that the three-word phrase “will make you” got double the number of Facebook shares than any other headline type. Here is a list of the best-performing headline phrases according to BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo’s research provides valuable insights into the concept of “clickbait headlines,” which marketers widely use nowadays. Most headline phrases from their chart add an element of intrigue, information gap, curiosity, and uniqueness to headlines, making them irresistible to click.

Additionally, I utilize MediumStats.com

This tool helps me sort and analyze high-engagement articles with captivating headlines.