Member-only story
Medium’s missing metrics
I’m reconsidering how I publish writing online, moving from a blog that lives on Medium to a distributed approach with a website home base. Even after six years(!) publishing on Medium, I still find myself missing key functionality in the day-to-day experience. One key aspect: the way Medium reports metrics.
Specifically, Medium is missing the ability to see traffic breakdowns by day, to know which stories make up what percent of pageviews from each day’s total. As a writer, I can see my view total broken down by day. I can see total view counts for each story, and I can see trends over time in the detailed story view. But I can’t combine these views, to query a specific day’s total for a detailed per-story breakdown.
This is a nitpick! But it’s also deeply important for planning out posts and building an audience. I need to know what does well over time — is that post from a month ago still driving the lion’s share of traffic? Do some topics seem to have a longer shelf life than others? Do readers want different things on different days of the week?
When I worked as a data analyst, I answered these kinds of questions for coworkers all the time. I’d love to answer them for my own writing, but I’m hampered by this one missing feature.
Of course, companies make technical tradeoffs all the time, calculating the line where investment fails to pay off, where feature expansion turns into feature creep. Some users always get left in the margins of those calculations, trying to do something the software just won’t let them. Sometimes, they engineer hacks or workarounds (there’s a quite convoluted — and possibly broken? — one to get Google Analytics on Medium). Sometimes, software is open and adaptable. And sometimes, it’s time to find an alternative.
