Are Medium inflating your audience numbers to attract Elon Musk?

Let’s tweet about it to make sure.

Photo by Gilly on Unsplash

Disclaimer: see end of this text

I don’t know about you, but I love a good statistic. That’s one reason I love Medium’s stats, because you can see all that intricate detail about your post. How you use that is up to you, and I’m guessing you need to have some sort of critical mass before you can really apply some tactics to it.

One stat I enjoy watching is my audience, and my audience is small. The reason I check on it from time to time is because a fellow Medium user was close to quite a significant milestone. We were planning a party for her when she hit this number.

Then it happened.

From 100 odd to 200 odd

I suffered in the Medium Purge. When they removed fake accounts, spam accounts, or who knows what accounts. By suffer I mean purely in numbers, because actually what Medium was trying to do was ensure a quality of users on the site. People that might actually read, clap and comment.

I slowly watched our numbers climb towards those milestones again, ordering in some fancy wine from some grandfather’s basement and a bottle of rakija to go with it.