What is the right time to publish (a story) on Medium? — for maximum results
Know the optimal time to publish.
I confess. I never timed my publishing. There’s no strategy I used in particular to maximize the views.
Yet, so many fellow writers were asking me this. This is for them. (A bit long article with detailed analysis).
I post around 5 stories per week. Sometimes less, sometimes a story a day.
Regardless of when I publish, I always see the graph go high on weekends or holidays.
But the stats of my friend show that his stories are received (read) by readers during weekdays.
From the screenshot of the stats from yet another friend, I found it to not so correlating to any time or day of the week.
Then I found out it works differently for different niches.
For example, if you write about productivity most people read these topics in their office time procrastinating the actual work by reading/searching articles on “procrastination”. (not a joke though).
If leadership and team productivity are your niche then they get peak views during weekdays.
After the 2023 change in the distribution strategy of Medium, stories gain traction slowly — not immediately. Your stories will be pushed to a wide and large set of readers based on their performance (claps and comments count) with a small set of readers during the first phase.
So analysis based on the correlation of publishing time and its performance is a kind of wrong approach. This approach may work better for calculating email newsletter performance.
In Medium, there’s a gap between when you publish and when it is distributed (to the larger set of audiences). This is true if you have a small set of followers, say 500.
If you have 50000 followers, your story will be delivered to them. If 5% (2500) of your followers read the story, Medium can estimate the performance of your story and then decide to push it to all of your followers. If it performs well with the majority of your followers, then it will be pushed further to wider/new audiences.
You wouldn’t be worrying about when to publish if you had 50000 followers.
Tim Denning (one of the best writers with 350k+ followers) once published 8 articles on the same day. Now he publishes mostly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. To make it more truthful, I have never seen him publish on Sundays. This inference could be wrong, or he may be purely doing it for a different reason.
If I take Darius Foroux (300k+ followers) to solve this, the equation changes entirely. He publishes on random dates.
Seth Godin (136k followers) entirely left Medium for his email Newsletter to deliver his blog post. For him, this (Medium) reach is not effective when compared to his newsletter performance.
So-called big writers, write and publish. Thats it. I think they wouldn’t be worrying about this issue. So let's leave them or any writing soul (who has more than 50k followers) out of this analysis.
finding optimal publishing time for budding writers
Well, I had the chance to analyze only very few of my fellow writers in Medium.
It’s hard to pinpoint the time based on my analysis.
to find your own optimal time for publishing
- Write and post every day. (write at least 100 stories in your niche)
- Analyze your stats. (after a month)
Because everything differs as the niche and according to the culture of your majority audience.
That means the optimal time is specific to the niche you write on. And that too is not need to be accurate.
In general,
Post on Fridays. And avoid posting on Mondays — unless it's a national holiday. Wednesdays are also a good choice.
To be frank, optimizing your publishing time will not help you to a great extent (especially, if you’re not in news publishing).
Those who write/publish daily shouldn’t be worrying about anything.
You can also publish all stories (like 7 stories) at once at the same time. If you interlink them, you will reap more benefits. (if a story reaches the reader, he will be presented with links (teaser) for the other 6 stories within it).
More reach = more success.
Pro Tip: Write a few follow-up stories on the same thing/idea to keep your story (your name) up when many copycat articles are published soon after your story. (for more pro tips, follow me)
Closing…
Stop fussing around.
- Write.
- Publish.
- Get feedback.
- Repeat.
- Refine this process.
The best optimal time to publish your article is the time you finish it — with satisfaction.
Let the process refine itself.
Let the frequency of posting help you — and the quality of your writing.
If we’re meeting here for the first time, check the articles in the below list.
