<i>Every time I publish a post I’m offered a check box, checked by default, that means, “People who haven’t paid Medium may not be able to see this.” Since my goal is to make my writing as widely available as possible, I always uncheck this box.</i><p>Hmmmm, didn't realise that was the author's choice (default tbf). I'd assumed some sort of algorithm. Interesting. Kudos for keeping it free, anyway.
> The traffic from Hacker News is bi-modal. If a post takes off, HN provides 50–60% of the views (along with some delightfully readable comments)(jk).<p>I guess it’s my turn to add to that: I think this is more like a Pareto distribution than a bimodal one, since there really doesn’t have two modes.
The author could move to a new blogsite and clone articles to Medium to keep that 18% audience. Treat it more like Twitter/FB/HN instead of the only source.<p>This has the drawback of more work for the author though. Perhaps there are tools that auto-publish to Medium for you.
I'm still lost with medium publishing.<p>* Did not check box for my most widely read article that had 15k views, so did not get any money. Clicked link for two other articles (10k and 5k reads), yet $$ for each is super different (I know it depends on /who/ reads, but hard to get a sense of what to expect)<p>* Still don't exactly know what it means when someone asks me to publish to their publication. Is it exclusive? I know it is distributed.<p>* Still can't figure out an easy way to separate out accounts (I write creative non-fiction and philosophy and poetry and I also write programming tutorials - not much overlap between the audiences) other than publishing into different publications.<p>In general I like the Medium model, I like being there as a reader and a writer, but it is hard to figure out the best way to use it.
> My conclusion from these data is that I shouldn’t bother with Facebook.<p>I would say the opposite. You have 2k page followers on Facebook (1% of your traffic) and 148k on Twitter (20% of your traffic). That means you need ~7.5k followers on Twitter vs 2k on Facebook to get 1% of your views. Thus, Facebook followers are 3-4 times better for your conversions. If you focus on Facebook, you'll get bigger audiences quicker.<p>(Assuming everything goes as it has gone so far, etc etc)