Traffic and visitor statistics are available for stories you publish on Medium.
Accessing your stats
- On your homepage, click on your profile picture.
- Click Stats.
- In the app, tap your profile picture on the bottom bar.
- Tap Settings in the top-right corner.
- Tap Story stats.
The bar graph represents overall traffic on all of your published stories and responses over the last thirty days.
- Views
- Number of visitors who clicked on a story's page. This number will also capture any views of your story that are read via RSS readers (such as Pocket), and those will be indicated with a "+" sign next to the main view count.
- Reads
- Number of visitors who have read the entire story (an estimate).
- Fans
- Number of unique readers who clapped for this story. Note that each user can clap up to 50 times for a story, but they will be counted as one fan. Learn more about claps.
Your story's detailed stats page
For each story you’ve published, click Details to understand more about the audience for that story.
Lifetime summary
At the top of the details page, you’ll see a summary of the story’s performance to date, including “Total Views” (all-time visits to your story) and “Read Ratio” (an estimate of the percentage of viewers that reached the end of your story).
If you published the story through the Medium Partner Program, you’ll also see the “Lifetime Earnings” (how much money it’s earned as of the previous Sunday).
Your story's impact
Below the summary, you’ll see a visualization of your traffic over the past 30 days. You can hover over any date to see how many views you received on that day. On each day, you’ll see a breakdown of how many views came from Medium distribution (dark green) — the app, homepage, and emails, and through Medium's Facebook and Twitter accounts — and how much came from external traffic off-Medium (light green).
Boost
If your story was Boosted, you will see it indicated on the graph. Learn more.
Views by Traffic Source
Here, you’ll see a breakdown of your traffic sources. You’ll see an aggregate number of views that came from Medium’s distribution — and then a list of your top external sources of views. You can click on “twitter.com,” “facebook.com,” or “linkedin.com” to search those platforms for posts that include a link your story.
If you published your story through the Partner Program, you’ll also see the number of views that came from your personal Friend Link. Friend Links are special links that you can use to give your readers free access to a story you publish behind our metered paywall.
Your Readers’ Interests
To help you understand your audience more fully, here, you’ll see a chart that shows the topics that the readers of this story are most interested in. The listed percentages are the proportion of logged-in viewers of the story who follow each topic. You can use this data to decide what you might want to write about next and to see whether you’re reaching your intended audience. Note: to protect reader privacy, we will not show this data unless your story has reached a certain threshold of logged-in readers.
Note: The story details page can be accessed from mobile apps by going to your profile, tapping Stats, and then tapping on the story title.
Internal vs. external views
On your stats page, you will see two categories of traffic sources: Internal and External. Here is how those are determined and calculated.
An external view is defined as traffic coming from a full Medium URL that has been shared to another social network, email, chat, or other sharing system. If those other sources provide us with trackable referrer details, they will show in your referrer list.
Please note: Medium links shared via our in-product sharing tools or shortened links do NOT count as external views. If you wish to track traffic from external sources, do not use our in-product sharing tools.
An internal view is defined as traffic generated out of Medium.com itself. This includes:
- The Medium homepage feed
- Any “read-next” surfaces on Medium pages
- Medium topic pages
- Medium profile pages
- Medium emails and digests
- Official Medium social media accounts
- Medium newsletters
- Posts shared via our in-product tools to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn
- Posts shared with a shortened “link.medium.com” URL
Please note: If you share a Medium post using our in-product tools to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or with a shortened “link.medium.com” URL, those are considered internal views and those referrers will NOT show in the referrers list.
Common questions
There are two reasons why you may observe slight changes to your stats over time.
First, if the account of a user who engages (views, claps, etc.) with your story is deleted or suspended, then the engagement will also be removed. This can cause changes in your stats months or even years after the original engagement.
Second, you may see fluctuations in your recent stats based on the way that we calculate and provide real-time stats. This does not reflect a change in the actual metrics, but rather is a temporary side effect when tracking live stats. Below is an explanation:
We maintain two sources of stats for your stories:
- The first is a stable, long-term count of all engagement throughout time.
- The second is a short-term count that is updated in real-time. This real-time count has not yet been processed through robust deduplication checks and other safeguards.
Every hour, recent engagement on your post from the last hour is processed and converted from the short-term count into the long-term stable count. During this processing, we may identify duplicate or erroneous counts of the same clap or read. Therefore, the long-term stable count for that time period may end up differing slightly from the short-term count you previously saw. You will not observe fluctuations to your stats for a given time period in the long run, except in the case of user account deletion mentioned above.