Surpricing Insights From Top Authors' Dashboard

Lessons I learned from analyzing Medium top author's posts

Finn Tropy

May 19, 2024

Introduction

I am studying my favorite authors to learn from their stories.

I built a simple data pipeline that leverages Medium public APIs to pull the details into a database.

I created a dashboard to review the data by author, below is an example of Tim Denning’s data.

So far, I have analyzed the stories of ten different authors, each with a large following and highly engaging stories.

Surprising Insights

Audience

I filtered the count of followers of each author by membership status, and expected the distribution between member and non-member followers to be roughly the same for each author.

I was very surprised to see that for some authors like Todd Brison, Medium members were only 9% of his total followers. So majority of his 67.9K followers were non-members.

On the other end of the spectrum, 56% of Malky McEwan’s 8.3K followers are members.

Why would two great authors have such a vast difference in their audience?

Let’s look at what Malky and Todd are writing about. Perhaps their stories are attracting different groups of Medium readers?

The following chart compares Malky and Todd based on the tags they have selected for their stories.

Malky’s stories have often humor / humour, sometimes satirical elements. He writes funny stories about his career in Scottish police. He shares life lessons, writing tips and self-improvement ideas.

Todd’s focus is on creativity, motivation and he writes inspirational stories about writing and entrepreneurship.

This doesn’t really explain the difference in their audience structure.

Let’s compare Malky and Todd by Publications.

Malky is owner and editor of the E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower, so we can see 17% of his posts published there as he was ramping up the publication. He is very active in commenting and responding to other authors, so 38% of his responses are coming from that publication.

Almost 50% of Todd’s posts are published in Personal Growth and Spark publications. 47% of his responses are coming from Personal Growth.

I don’t have the details of the audience for these publications, but I doubt that this explains the difference in Todd’s and Malky’s audience structure.

Finally, let’s compare Malky and Todd by claps and responses over time.

Todd was an early adopter on Medium, his first post was 01/27/2015. We can see no activity after 5/25/2021. He is currently working as a business partner of Tim Denning and offering training courses and workshops for aspiring writers.

Malky’s first post was on 8/25/2020, and he is currently very active on Medium.

Todd’s followers signed up during a rapid growth period of Medium. Only small portion of them became paying members. Also, the Medium monetization rules have changed multiple times since 2015, with the most recent changes in August 2023.

Malky started 4 years ago, and the referral bonus program was put in place in Aug 2021. This program was focused on converting readers to Medium members, and gave authors incentive to promote referred memberships.

I believe this explains such a big difference in membership status of their followers.

Conclusion

I love working with data. I built a simple data pipeline that leverages Medium public APIs to pull the details into a database to create these different views.

Having the ability to analyze the data from multiple perspectives gives insights, such as

How different authors engage with and grow their audience?
What strategies related to publications might be applicable over time?
What topics different authors are focusing on and how does that relate to publications they use?

Please suggest authors you would like to see this kind of analysis done.