Insight #2: Medium is a serious place

Here are the most common tags among these top 252 stories:

+------------------+-------------+------------+
|       Tag        |   Stories   | Percentage |
+------------------+-------------+------------+
| Startup          |          62 | 25%        |
| Tech             |          47 | 19%        |
| Life Lessons     |          45 | 18%        |
| Entrepreneurship |          37 | 15%        |
| Design           |          34 | 13%        |
| Self improvement |          31 | 12%        |
| Productivity     |          26 | 10%        |
| Politics         |          21 | 8%         |
| Programming      |          18 | 7%         |
| UX               |          18 | 7%         |
| JavaScript       |          10 | 4%         |
| Web Development  |          10 | 4%         |
+------------------+-------------+------------+

The following topics — which are the basis of most popular magazines — occurred zero times:

• sports
• fitness
• cars
• weddings
• gaming
• homes
• food
• celebrities
• finance

“Humor” occurred 9 times, and “satire” 5 times. But that’s about it.

It seems that most people read Medium to:

• get motivated
• learn more about their field

Judging by this dataset, the stereotype of Medium’s readership as developer-designer-hustlers isn’t all that far from the truth.

Insight #3: You should definitely try to get your story into a publication

+----------------------+---------+-----+----------------+
|      Publication     | Stories |  %  |     Topic      |
+----------------------+---------+-----+----------------+
| Not in a publication |      67 | 26% | n/a            |
| The Mission          |      52 | 21% | Productivity   |
| Free Code Camp       |      30 | 12% | Technology     |
| Signal VS Noise      |       7 | 3%  | Startups       |
| Hi My name is Jon    |       4 | 2%  | Jon Westenberg |
| Slackjaw             |       4 | 2%  | Humor          |
| Startup Grind        |       4 | 2%  | Startups       |
| Year of Looking Glass|       4 | 2%  | Julie Zhuo     |
| The Startup          |       4 | 2%  | Startups       |
| Be Yourself          |       3 | 1%  | Life           |
| Art of Practicality  |       3 | 1%  | Productivity   |
| Conquer Corp America |       3 | 1%  | Productivity   |
| Personal Growth      |       2 | 1%  | Productivity   |
| The Coffeelicious    |       2 | 1%  | Startups       |
| Development Set      |       2 | 1%  | Education      |
| UX Design            |       2 | 1%  | UX             |
+----------------------+---------+-----+----------------+

A vast majority of the top 252 stories were published in one of Medium’s publications.

If you think about this for a moment, it makes perfect sense. These stories showed up not only in the news feeds of the readers who followed their authors, but also readers who followed the publication.

And some of these publications have a lot of followers.

Insight #4: Personal stories do better

Here’s a lexical analysis of the most common words in the titles of the top 252 stories. I’ve filtered out stop words like “the” and “of.”

+-------+-----------------+
| Count |      word       |
+-------+-----------------+
|    42 |  you            |
|    39 |  i              |
|    30 |  how            |
|    24 |  your           |
|    16 |  about          |
|    15 |  my             |
|    14 |  people         |
|    14 |  life           |
|    12 |  why            |
|    11 |  design         |
|    10 |  me             |
|     9 |  trump          |
|     9 |  read           |
|     9 |  learn          |
|     8 |  time           |
|     7 |  new            |
|     7 |  letter         |
|     6 |  yourself       |
|     6 |  live           |
|     6 |  job            |
|     6 |  better         |
|     5 |  year           |
|     5 |  white          |
|     5 |  silicon valley |
|     5 |  stop           |
|     5 |  never          |
|     5 |  most           |
|     5 |  f***           |
|     5 |  free           |
|     5 |  apps           |
|     4 |  world          |
|     4 |  work           |
|     4 |  websites       |
|     4 |  web            |
|     4 |  successful     |
|     4 |  smarter        |
|     4 |  open           |
|     4 |  javascript     |
|     4 |  hard           |
|     4 |  guide          |
|     4 |  f******        |
|     4 |  code           |
|     3 |  wish           |
|     3 |  technology     |
|     3 |  startup        |
|     3 |  secret         |
|     3 |  quit           |
|     3 |  productivity   |
|     3 |  programming    |
|     3 |  powerful       |
|     3 |  medium         |
|     3 |  love           |
|     3 |  future         |
|     3 |  development    |
|     3 |  developer      |
|     3 |  designer       |
|     3 |  career         |
|     3 |  business       |
+-------+-----------------+

The words “you” and “I” were by far the most common, which suggests that addressing the reader directly as an individual person is a better writing strategy than writing in third person.

The most common words that fell outside of the 100 most common English language words were “life” and “design.”