Truth Be Told: Medium Doesn’t Want Quality Stories, But Quantity Stories
If I’m honest
You’ve been told a lie.
Publishing 4 stories a month can’t pass the view count of publishing 15 stories — assuming that the stories are pretty much similar in quality.
Because it makes sense to think: You are a writer, and as a writer, how can you suddenly jump from being a “Quality stories” writer to a “Crap stories” creator. This doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe one story will be more valuable and helpful than the others. But there won’t be a big difference. Because writing is practice — and you’ve done the practice — enough.
Let me show you some stats to prove my point.
So in October, I published 30+ stories. I know that’s a lot. But guess what? Because the volume was high, the views increased. Keep in mind: the quality of the stories has to be OKAY (if not good) to get views.
As a result, I got 25,000 views in October month.
Now let’s talk about November.
So this month, I’ve only published 10 stories. As a result, the views dropped significantly. You can see below that I only got 3,700 views in November.
What changed suddenly? Did I become a bad writer from a good writer? Did my stories suddenly become useless and crap? What’s the deal?
Nothing changed.
The reason was simple: I didn’t publish enough stories to maintain that previous month's view count (25k.) But if I had, I would have pretty much the same views in November as well.
And this is what you need to understand.
I don’t know about other platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn, but I have had enough experience writing on Medium so I can say: Volume wins here no matter how many times they change their algorithm or system.
But they say “Publish quality stories” so you believe it and change your publishing strategy from 5 times a week to once a week.
The terrifying mistake.
But the reality is, on Medium — the more you publish, the more views you get. It’s so simple but everyone thinks it’s wrong and bad way to do it.
Just think about it.
First, you aren’t a bad writer, so there is a 1% chance you’re writing crap.
Second, the Medium doesn’t show your stories to your all followers. Say you have 1,000 followers, what do you think your all followers will read the story? No, they don’t.
Only 1% or less than 1% of your followers will read or see your story. This means you need to churn out more stories to increase the “percentage” from 1% to maybe 10%.
And you can only do it by writing a lot. Now I’m not saying all you should do is to create crap using ChatGPT. Nope.
And this is why, from the next month, I’ll be churning out as many as stories I can. Because now I firmly believe that it’s the only way to beat the game — ensuring the quality is OKAY.
You can’t thrive writing quality stories, you can’t thrive writing quantity stories. But the only way to thrive is to write quality plus quantity stories.
