Each story has its own detailed stats page where you can view comprehensive information about your story's performance over time.
The first thing you will see is the story preview at the top of the page. If your story has been boosted or featured in a publication, you will also see a badge that indicates that.
Below the preview, the stats page is split into: Lifetime, Monthly, Traffic sources, Friend links (if the story is paywalled), and Audience interests.
Lifetime
The Reach funnel shows you how your story is performing since it was published.
- Total number of presentations. How many times Medium has suggested your stories within the website or app, or through email and push notifications (excluding the Digest). Presentations are not available for stories published before 2025.
- Total number of views. How many times readers have landed on your story. This section also includes the Feed clickthrough rate, which represents the percentage of views your story is getting in relation to presentations made exclusively via the feeds. Keep in mind that the Feed clickthrough rate will only be shown when there’s enough data.
- Total number of reads. How many times readers have read your stories for at least 30 seconds. This section also includes the total Read ratio.
Impact gives you additional performance metrics.
- Earnings show you the total amount accrued by the story since it was paywalled. This section is only visible on paywalled stories.
- Followers show the total number of readers who opted to follow or unfollow you after reading the story.
- Subscribers show the total number of readers who opted to subscribe or unsubscribe after reading the story.
The Lifetime metrics are updated hourly (except earnings, which are updated daily).
Monthly
The monthly section shows how readers are engaging with your story on a given month, which can be selected by clicking on the pill-shaped select on the top right corner of this section.
The included metrics are earnings, views, reads, and engagement. This last section includes:
- Total clappers: The number of readers who clapped on this story at least once.
- Total highlighters: The number of readers who highlighted this story at least once.
- Total responders: The number of readers who wrote at least one response to this story.
- Total followers: The number of readers who followed you after reading this story.
It’s important to note that whenever you see yellow in the charts, that means the metric could be contributing to the story earnings. Keep in mind that stories only accrue earnings while they are paywalled and do not earn retroactively.
The Reads section also includes the Member read ratio that we use to adjust your earnings and discourage clickbait and misleading titles. This ratio is defined as: “member reads ÷ member views.” Learn more about the Partner Program earnings.
This section is updated daily.
Traffic sources
Here, you’ll see a breakdown of your traffic sources. You’ll see the percentage of views that came from Medium’s distribution—and then a list of your top external sources.
This section is updated hourly.
Friend links
If your story is paywalled, 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 paywall.
This section is updated hourly.
Readers’ interests
To help you understand your audience, the Audience interests shows you a chart with the topics that the readers of the 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.
This section will populate if we can detect enough affinity for a particular topic from your audience.
That analysis is based on whether they have Medium accounts, the explicit interests of those accounts, and their reading history. If we don't have enough data, it won't populate.
So, for example, if you have a story with a large amount of external traffic, we won't have any data on those readers, as they are likely not to be account holders.
If you have a lot of readers who are account holders and still don't see that section, it is possible they are not explicitly following the topics you assigned to the story. It is also possible that those accounts don't follow any topics, or we don't have enough data to determine their interests.
This section is updated daily.