Analyzing_Medium

What is Medium?

Medium is a blogging platform where writers and readers share their ideas. With a strong following in the tech community, it is a place where people can come to learn from professionals and industry experts. I began writing on Medium very recently, inspired to write about data-science and machine learning. For more information, check out my writing here.

This Project

In this project I collected data on 1.4 million unique Medium stories from 95 of the most popular writing subjects. I used this data to answer the following questions.

1. What do I need to know about Medium as a writer and as a reader? (source)
2. Who are the top Data-Science writers on Medium? (source)
3. How can Medium writer's measure the performance of their stories? How can they compare their performance to that of similar writers? (source)

After I answered these questions I wrote a story detailing my findings in Medium's largest tech publication, freeCodeCamp (496k subscribers). The full article can be found here. I then published the full data-set for public use by the Medium community. All 1.4 million data points are freely available on Kaggle. My introductory article, describing the dataset and how I collected it, can be found here.

This repository is a collection of everything I found while analyzing the Medium data. For a list of key findings look in the next section.

My Findings

1. Most Stories on Medium receive very little reader engagement.

2. Stories are shorter in length. (2-3 Minutes)

3. Most authors only wrote one story, and a quarter were published in a publication.

4. The top 1% of stories received more than two thousand claps.

5. Authors can compare their stories to the top 1% of stories in their writing-topic.

6. The most-clapped stories on freeCodeCamp far outrank other, larger, publications.

7. Here are the top 100 most-clapped data-science writers on Medium of the last year.