I posted a Vocal link to ManyStories. ManyStories says 10 people read it. Vocal says only one. They say they pay for views from anywhere but they're lying.
I , too, find it harder to be optimistic about medium- itās just easier for me to put energy into my substack. I know my readers care and I get consistently high % of views and comments. The engagement is so different than on medium.
Same for me, Linda - and I really appreciate how Substack shows that people click links we include within our pieces, which is not available via Medium. I also received a "warning" about something unspecific, that said if I get another "warning" I could be removed from Medium's program. I wrote what I could find as a support email asking what this was about. I haven't heard back. They have been, and continue to be, farming us. And doing a bad job. The numbers are meaningless and I can tell they aren't really updated or accurate, in general - that's a significant difference between the Substack clicks and what Medium says. I think they "reduced our views" and "reduced $$" for a simple reason - they don't have the money.
I [have] read in both places but let my Medium sub expire. I'd rather pay that more directly to a Substack writer because Medium is a now ghost town, to me, and will only let you read one or two articles per month. Writers here are typically much more specialized and that's what I want. The downside is I am more selective in whom I can pay for.
Anyone, who has tried advertising on Fakebook, knows you can't always tell what a real click is. As a data guy, I am not surprised the stats don't match, infuriating though it is. There are many variables [like definition of a click, reporting interval, timing etc] that we don't know, which may differ between platforms.
There may be technical explanation for this. Letās say some of your readers are using iPhones. iPhones donāt let websites track users any more. So they may have clicked the link on Substack, but Medium couldnāt track where they came from. Iād assume the Substack link clicks are more accurate than the Medium data.
An alternate explanation: I suspect that many, maybe most, of your Substack subscribers were already getting email from you on Medium. I'm one of those, and I did click the link, but didn't read the post on Medium as I'd already received in by email. So maybe Medium only counts an incoming link if the post is actually read.
RE:Doesnāt make any sense to me at all. 15 clicked at Substack, 2 arrived on Medium? Weird.
Maybe not weird. Maybe just BS from yet another company cheating ppl...sorry (not) for the skepticism. My training in the scientific method AND life has sharpened my BS radar (hey, I had my 71st birthday in October, so Iāve seen a lot of BS from the corporate world).
OR, to be kind, maybe thereās a lag in reporting numbers on Mediumās platform? That is, not in real time until they update info from their servers to user accounts every few days??? Just a guess, in my attempt to give them the benefit of the doubt. My BS detectors arenāt 100 percent accurate. š¤Ŗ
I myself noticed before that Medium is almost certainly undercounting friend link clicks (through a similar method, I drove traffic to a friend link through a service where I could see how many clicked the friend link, and the numbers didn't add up).
Ugh...I really want to be optimistic about the "new" Medium, but they're sure not making it easy.
I posted a Vocal link to ManyStories. ManyStories says 10 people read it. Vocal says only one. They say they pay for views from anywhere but they're lying.
I , too, find it harder to be optimistic about medium- itās just easier for me to put energy into my substack. I know my readers care and I get consistently high % of views and comments. The engagement is so different than on medium.
Same for me, Linda - and I really appreciate how Substack shows that people click links we include within our pieces, which is not available via Medium. I also received a "warning" about something unspecific, that said if I get another "warning" I could be removed from Medium's program. I wrote what I could find as a support email asking what this was about. I haven't heard back. They have been, and continue to be, farming us. And doing a bad job. The numbers are meaningless and I can tell they aren't really updated or accurate, in general - that's a significant difference between the Substack clicks and what Medium says. I think they "reduced our views" and "reduced $$" for a simple reason - they don't have the money.
This is an interesting test.
I [have] read in both places but let my Medium sub expire. I'd rather pay that more directly to a Substack writer because Medium is a now ghost town, to me, and will only let you read one or two articles per month. Writers here are typically much more specialized and that's what I want. The downside is I am more selective in whom I can pay for.
Anyone, who has tried advertising on Fakebook, knows you can't always tell what a real click is. As a data guy, I am not surprised the stats don't match, infuriating though it is. There are many variables [like definition of a click, reporting interval, timing etc] that we don't know, which may differ between platforms.
There may be technical explanation for this. Letās say some of your readers are using iPhones. iPhones donāt let websites track users any more. So they may have clicked the link on Substack, but Medium couldnāt track where they came from. Iād assume the Substack link clicks are more accurate than the Medium data.
An alternate explanation: I suspect that many, maybe most, of your Substack subscribers were already getting email from you on Medium. I'm one of those, and I did click the link, but didn't read the post on Medium as I'd already received in by email. So maybe Medium only counts an incoming link if the post is actually read.
Just as an idea, could try publishing a post on Medium as unlisted and then retry the experiment. Keep up the neat deep dives Linda, cheers!
Oaf! That IS like finding a mouse when searching for a potato. Not good. Not good at all.
RE:Doesnāt make any sense to me at all. 15 clicked at Substack, 2 arrived on Medium? Weird.
Maybe not weird. Maybe just BS from yet another company cheating ppl...sorry (not) for the skepticism. My training in the scientific method AND life has sharpened my BS radar (hey, I had my 71st birthday in October, so Iāve seen a lot of BS from the corporate world).
OR, to be kind, maybe thereās a lag in reporting numbers on Mediumās platform? That is, not in real time until they update info from their servers to user accounts every few days??? Just a guess, in my attempt to give them the benefit of the doubt. My BS detectors arenāt 100 percent accurate. š¤Ŗ
Hi Linda, Nice experiment ^^ I also figured that Medium's stats in regard to traffic sources are inaccurate.
Here's what I know: you get a notification by Medium telling you that they "boost" you. You get this via email (as in the old days of 2021 haha).
I can write a story about it and share a screenshot so that you can see how it looks like.
Do you think it's because Medium only counts the read if the reader scrolls all the way to the bottom?
Thanks for sharing another interesting experiment, Linda. :)
#truthbombers you are, Linda! haha
Thanks for doing this little experiment.
Goes to show why sometimes, a part of me is so skeptical with "data" and "evidence" these days, even though I was/am trained in science.
We no longer eat culture for breakfast, but data.
And it also seems like, we are getting "obese" with data, if we aren't mindful of what we are "consuming".
Anyways, I didn't really compare stats, though the bigger question now is, what will Medium do anyway?
I myself noticed before that Medium is almost certainly undercounting friend link clicks (through a similar method, I drove traffic to a friend link through a service where I could see how many clicked the friend link, and the numbers didn't add up).
Always appreciated forensic insights!