How Much I Earned From a Viral (Non-Boosted) Story on Medium
You never know when a piece of your writing's about to take off.
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February was a slow one for me on Medium, for the most part.
I took a 10-day break from the platform at the end of January after feeling a little burned out. That happens to everyone, right?
I returned at the end of the first week in February armed with fresh ideas and enthusiasm.
Still, the month dragged until around February 20, when I started experimenting with engagement. You can read more about what I did (and why) here.
My metrics ticked upwards after 9 days of consistent engagement on the platform — it was a welcome encouragement.
But things really exploded on the last day of February.
What happened?
This article, for whatever reason, got picked up my Medium’s mysterious algorithm.
I was shocked to see how quickly it gathered views and reads. February 29 certainly was a leap day for me as my stats rocketed upwards.
And those glorious blue and green curves continued to rise throughout the first week in March.
In fact, that article (which was, ironically, about engagement) got more engagement than any piece I’ve written so far on Medium in 2024.
I kept expecting the curve to tail off, but for a solid 6 days, it kept climbing.
It only began to drop off after March 5 and returned to a “normal” level by the next day.
Still, it was fun while it lasted, and meant that March was on course to be a more fruitful month for me than February.
I know the figures have been massively skewed by one viral piece (most of my other stories were pretty bog-standard) but I’ll take it.
What caused the viral leap?
In short, I’m not entirely sure.
There’s rarely any rhyme or reason behind the Medium algorithm’s decisions to pick up certain stories, especially when they haven’t been boosted by a publication.
I can only hazard a few guesses about this one, such as:
It had an intriguing headline that included the word “Medium” and some numbers (these always encourage click-throughs).
The subheading mentioned a previous experiment — I’m starting to think Medium readers enjoy that sort of thing.
The feature image of a pleasantly-surprised man at his computer hints at some positive results of the commenting strategy.
I started off with a story that didn’t reveal the results of the commenting approach right away.
My subheadings also didn’t give anything away (lots of writers make this mistake and it kills read ratios).
I broke up the article with bullet points, embeds and different font formats.
I asked questions at the end to encourage readers to comment before they moved on.
Of course, anyone can employ any of these techniques in any article. It’s standard practice for me.
But it doesn’t always work. This is just an example of one occasion that did.
And now, what you’re really here for — my earnings (so far) from my viral article:
The best part for me is the very high read ratio because it speaks to an article structure that keeps readers engaged all the way through.
This is now my second-highest earning article after 10 months in the Medium Partner Programme.
What’s next?
Now that I’ve identified (or rather, confirmed) some theories about which article elements are most effective at keeping readers on board, I’ll double down on them.
I’ve used the story-testing-success-application framework for quite a while now, and it’s nice to see it paying off handsomely with this article.
The biggest takeaway?
Keep writing, keep learning, keep tweaking.
You don’t know when an article is about to take off.
Have you ever had an article go viral on Medium or Substack? Why do you think it happened?
Congrats, David. Per Medium rules meta stories aren't distributed so this was just a glitch in the Matrix. Nevertheless, some yours tips can be applied to non-meta. I'd recommend not using clickbait as it's also a big no-no on Medium.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me - the Medium algorithm or the Boost algorithm.
I wrote an article last June titled "As a Heavy User, My Mood Towards GPT Has Changed: Here’s Why".
It didn't get a lot of reads at the start, then in the middle of July, it went kooky. It's made me $503 so far and is my 4th highest-paying article. The article was never Boosted and pretty much all the views/reads were internal. With external, I've had a few articles show up high on Google search (15K-20K views) but they don't make much money on Medium.
On Medium Boosts - I've had 17 of them - some in Tech, some in life style. Very recently, I started focusing on title generation using an online headline analyzer tool. Once I started using it, I had 3 boosts in 6 articles. This made me realize that there's a connection between titles and boost-ability.
All this variability has also made me realize I need something more stable, which is why I'm gradually sliding over her to Substack.
My .02 :-)