How to Trend on Medium’s Top 6 Daily Trending Articles (With Data & Graphs)

Here’s What You Need to Know About the Top 6 Daily Trending Medium Blog Posts.

We Analyzed the Titles and Reading Times for 14 days (Almost 100 Articles!) to Find Out What Goes Viral.

Introduction

For writers, Medium.com is an absolutely ideal location to publish your work. If you’re part of our Writerly Income community, you know that we focus on 4 growth areas in our writing.

Medium.com ticks off three of the core growth areas:

Passive Income: Write today, make money infinitely if your article picks up reads

Craft: Writing an article a week will help you focus your message

Audience: Writers who publish consistently can have thousands of followers

Click here for more information on how to grow your audience.

The best reason to write for Medium? You don’t have to wait to be included. You can publish today!

That being said, if you want to reach a wider audience, you’ll want to follow these title and length trends to ensure you’re reaching the largest possible audience.

 

Publishing on Medium

Publishing on Medium can sometimes feel like tossing your words into a void.

Let’s start by acknowledging how difficult it is to get an article trending on Medium. Based on the numbers alone, it’s a daunting task. 

According to this article there are more than 47,000 new articles written EVERY DAY on Medium.com (as of September 2020). 

With so many articles every day, there had to be some way to increase the chances of going viral. 

We had a hunch. 

There had to be something in the title that added to the click rate. After all, people who chose to read an article, must have been enticed to do so by the title.

Medium strongly dislikes click-bait style titles. So none of the trending articles really fell to the wrong side of that click-bait line. 

Our second thought was, maybe there’s an optimal read time. Next to the title of each article, Medium adds how long it anticipates it will take to read the post. 

For example, this is an article written for the publication: SYNERGY.

Because read times are displayed next to titles, it seems reasonable to think there might be article lengths that are more likely to be selected by readers.

It turns out, there are some trends. But they weren’t what we thought they’d be.

This data analysis doesn’t take into account readership for an author (which obviously helps) because that’s out of our control as writers. We can control read time and title. We can’t change how many people are following us on Medium.

 

A Mountain of Readers

Before we dig into the numbers, let’s look at the upside of publishing on Medium. 

While it may be really difficult to trend on the platform, there’s a clear positive to publishing there. 

Even though there’s a growing number of published articles, there’s also an exponentially growing rate of readers. 

According to the CEO of Medium, Ev Williams, in an article a few months ago, the sheer number of people on Medium’s platform is astounding.

So even if you can’t get your work into that coveted top 6 trending spots, you can publish work that makes money or at least gains viewers. 

In this way you’re building your audience while developing your craft and earning passive income. 

For most writers, we want to know how to crack into that trending list displayed on the front page of Medium because articles on that page gain a huge proportion of traffic. 

Being placed on that front page means earning good money with an article. 

 

Notes on the Data

It’s important to note that articles that trended for multiple days were included each day. We did not strip away repeat articles.

Many articles trended for 2 or more days. If you’re interested in that data, feel free to comment below and we’ll post those stats.

Categories

We came up with the categories after tracking the titles for a few days and seeing what was popping up. As you’ll see, there’s a clear trend in titles on the list. 

Again, it wasn’t what we’d anticipated. 

Analyzed Title Categories

• Technology

• Number 

• Question

• Year 

• List Post 

• How To…

• Compare 

• Timely 

Technology

This category carries technology based terminology. This included words/phrases like: UX, Python, Mac, Java Script, Programming, etc.

Number

If the article used a numerical value in the post, it was counted in this category. We did not count it here if it used the year (see later category).

Question

Any title that posed a question (with question mark) was counted in this category. 

Year

For this category we included both 2020 and 2021.

List Post

Any article that suggested a list of topics was included.

How to…

In most cases, I took the exact “How to…” phrase. However, there were some posts that used slightly different phrasing but with the general idea of teaching the reader how to do something. So it’s notable that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a strict “How to…” title to fit this category.

Compare

This could be a comparison between products or ideas. Anytime two things were being compared in the title, we counted it.

Timely

This topic was strictly based on current events. We did not include new technology releases. Instead, this was solely on events that occurred that were covered or opinion articles about those topics.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s also very important to remember that the way we set up organizing the data means that articles can count for more than one category. For example, the title: 7 Best Writing Moves to Start Your Writing Career in 2021 – would score a point in the following categories: 

• Number (7)

• Year (2021)

After checking out the data, let me know if it’s what you expected or not.

 

Analyzing Trending Titles on Medium.com

As you can clearly see, the technology sector rules Medium’s trending topics. 

If you want to write a trending article, you have a much better chance of finding an audience if you write in the tech sector (and use specific terms in your title).

The number we’re most surprised about is the comparison percentage. Comparison articles do so well on the internet in general, I’m wondering if it’s something people aren’t interested in when visiting Medium.com. 

Or, if they want to compare topics, maybe they’re more likely to run a Google search. Let us know what you think in the comments because we’re genuinely stumped.

 

Read Times

We imagined there’d be a preference for shorter articles. However, there seems to be a sweet spot in article length. 

As you can see, the 6-7 minute mark is the common reading time for trending Medium articles.

The range in article length for this study was from 1 minute (one article) to 18 minutes (one article as well). So It’s safe to say those are outliers.

If you’re wondering what the percentage breakdown was for time ranges, check out the graph below. 

Conclusion – So You Want to Trend on Medium…

We read many of the articles that were trending each day. And while their titles varied (a few didn’t hit any of the title trending categories we laid out), every article had one thing in common:

They were all well written.

Sure, it’s great to hit some of these title categories. Honestly, most of this is good practice when it comes to coming up with a title anyway. But in the end, the elements each of the trending articles had in common: solid writing and fortunate timing.

If you read the articles written by top writers on Medium, they often admit they don’t even know when their articles are going to go viral. 

Our suggestion: Try to hit some of the trending categories in your titles. Maybe try to keep it around the 6-7 minute mark.

Ultimately, just churn out words. Publish them. Repeat. And someday you might just find yourself on the trending list!

Comment below if there’s data sets you’d want us to run for Medium’s articles.

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