The Truth About Medium - Part four - A few stats

Medium tends not to release too many details of stats relating to the platform. The details provided here are based on finding numbers across the web. Many are probably out of date.

How many members does Medium have?

I read elsewhere that to find an up-to-date number of registered users on the platform, you should check the number of followers of the official Medium Staff account for news and updates.

As of writing, Medium has 108 million followers.

Does that mean 108 million active accounts? I would guess not. It probably includes inactive accounts, including those who were once members of the MPP.

The number of subscribers who pay to read content on Medium?

Figures that I found on the web:

• 2019: 400,000 paid subscribers

• 2021: 725,000 paid subscribers

• 2024: 1,000,000 paid subscribers

I asked GPT-4o for user stats.

Monthly Readers: Over 100 million.

Monthly Visitors: Approximately 45 million.

Monthly Payout to Writers: Over $2 million

I have read variations on that 100 million figure — up to 110 million. 

The numbers are important, because writers are paid from member reads. 

You have to be a member of the MPP to be paid.

The 100 million+ reads a month figure looks impressive, but writers do not get paid for non-member reads. And non-members only get three “free” articles/stories a month to read. It is also possible to provide a free read link with each story, but I’ve found that most writers don’t use this.

As a writer on Medium, it is the member reads that will pay you. 

Finding those readers is the difficult part.

Medium says that the algorithm does all the hard work for you. It funnels your work to readers who might be interested to read what you write. A useful breakdown can be found here.

There is a catch-22, though. Writers that establish a track record of content that is well-received are more likely to be promoted by the algorithm.

So, if you get high views and reads (a high conversion rate of views to reads), with lots of claps and comments on your stories, then chances are you will be promoted.

But what if you get many non-member views and reads? What if the non-member views don’t become reads? It has never been clear to me to what extent non-member views and reads count in the calculation. I say that because I seem to get many non-member views but not that many reads. This doesn’t surprise me, as many of the stories cannot be read as they are “member” only.

Anyway, why should non-member views and reads count? The writer doesn’t get paid for them.

Here’s my latest, very low, view-to-read ratio.

The "presentations" is something that Medium has recently added.  It represents how widely the story has been shared (it is new, and I won't comment on whether it is useful or not at this stage).

That low view-to-read conversion probably results in lower payment because it suggests that people are not interested in reading the content.

However, most of those views are from non-members. I know that, because I have checked the individual stories. Unfortunately, Medium do not break these total figures down into member and non-member totals. I’d like to think that non-member views and reads don’t count in the calculation, but the truth is, I just don’t know. 

It’s one of the many mysteries of how things work on Medium.

Next, the biggest mystery of all, I will be talking about money.

 

Image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay