What Tony Said At Medium's Pub Crawl

Affinity, how Medium's algorithm works and how finding the right publications can make all the difference.

Happy Friday,

Don’t know if you knew or attended, but Tuesday was Pub Crawl at Medium. It was basically an opportunity for writers to connect with publishers. 100 publications and 8,000 writers attended. Here was my first takeaway when I logged in to have a look in the morning. A lot of writers really need to realize Medium is not Facebook. First thing I saw when I logged in was people dropping links to their stories and profiles in the general chat. That’s not ever going to work. Fastest way to get ignored.

Honestly, I missed most of it. Death in the family and technical issues on top but that’s life. Things happen. I did catch the key presentations and poked into some chat rooms when Zoom didn’t kick me out.

I got to listen to Roman (The Interstitial) talking with a couple of new writers about the importance of a publication functioning as a cohesive body and I want to talk about that a bit because it matters more than most writers might realize.

One thing every publication owner is familiar with is submissions that don’t fit the publication. Which is no commentary on quality. I’ve had some great pieces submitted that I had to reject simply because they don’t fit. Just this morning I had a writer reach out and say I submitted a self help post to your On Reflection publication and after pub crawl I realized that was not a good idea and I’m sorry. Made me smile.

Interestingly, in the opening presentation, Tony brought up a topic that ran parallel to the cohesiveness conversation Roman was having with new writers. Thought it might be a good topic to talk about.

Tony started by saying before the boost program, medium was losing paid members in droves. Membership had dropped to 680K paid members when boost launched. Now they’re knocking on the door of a million paid members. Medium will become profitable within the next couple of months for the first time. That’s good news for writers. The more paid members there are, the more writers earn.

Boost enticed new paid members, yes. But as a boost nominator here’s what I can tell you. A very small number of posts actually get boosted. Under 3% of the posts, on average. Most people have no idea the volume of content going up on Medium every day. 82,000 posts went up in publications in February alone. That doesn’t include the posts that are published in the wild, not in a publication.

With that much content going up, getting seen is a real concern for writers. What Tony mostly talked about is the importance of publications in helping writers reach their audience. You can listen to his talk here if you’re interested.

He brought up a topic many writers don’t think about. Affinity.

Let me give you an example. Writer A, let’s call her Susan, only writes about yoga. All the people who read her writing are there to read about yoga. Nice and simple.

But what about someone like me, who writes about multiple topics? I write about history, I write personal essays, I write about feminism and writing. I write whatever shows up. So it makes sense that some of my readers follow me for my history posts. Some for the feminism. Some for the personal essays and maybe some because they like the way I write and don’t care what I write about.

But me? I have less topic affinity than Susan does. Without publications, that might hurt me. Publications give me affinity.

Here’s why. Because the way the algorithm works at Medium is not the way other algorithms work. On most sites, the algorithms exist to measure popularity. See which posts are getting engagement, show more of those. That’s not how the algorithm works at Medium. Not one bit. At Medium, the algorithm is driven by affinity.

People see content based on affinity to what they’re already reading.

So when you do exactly what Roman and his new writers were talking about, when you build a publication that functions and reads as a cohesive unit, you make it easier for everything in that publication to find readers. Builds affinity.

What do you do with that as a writer? You think really hard about where your work fits. Not where you know and like the editor, not where you aren’t scared or are comfortable. But where each piece fits best. When you do that, you help your writing find affinity with the readers you want to reach.

Worth thinking about, I think.

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With that, I’d like to share links to the publications I work with and boost from. If any of them fit the writing you do, we’d love to see your work.

History of Women: we publish pieces that aren’t strictly historical but more a blending of past and present. How the history of women affects women today. Think of it like riffing off history. It’s a tiny pub that gets a ton of reads. 100K so far this year.

The Interstitial: I recently joined Roman as an editor for The Interstitial. We publish stories that examine the human experience. The writing is high quality, often highly metaphorical, and a lot of beautifully poetic prose. Go look. You’ll see what I mean.

On Reflection: Think of On Reflection as an oasis from the big bad world. A place to wander and think. It’s a step beyond “this happened to me” in that it’s the place to go to find silver linings, and things that feel good about being human in the world.

The Book Café: A place for book lovers to share everything from books to authors and anything related to the love of books. We don’t accept self help, business and marketing book reviews because there are better places for those.

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If you were at pub crawl, I’d love to know your takeaway!

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