How to Find the Most Read Stories in Any Medium Publication

Using a little URL trick

Screenshot courtesy of author

There are some big publications on Medium. By big, I mean they have hundreds of thousands of followers. When you go to their homepage you may see the newest stories or stories they feature, but have you ever wondered what the most read stories were?

Perhaps you’ve submitted to publications and you’ve wondered how your stories stacked up against the competition? You can see your own stats, but you can’t see others’.

Enter the Archive view. Not every publication displays a link to its archive, but with this little URL trick, you can get a little more insight on which stories are popular and how your own stories are performing in the publication.

1. Go to the publication you are curious about. This only works on a browser, not the Medium app.
2. In the address bar of the browser, add /archive to the end of the URL and press enter.
3. This will bring you to a version of the publication’s layout that will show you all the stories. At the top left, click on “All.”
4. Next, sort by “most read.”

Archive of The Writing Cooperative. Screenshot by author.

There you have it — a list of the most popular stories in that publication. What you will typically find is the most read stories are the ones which have been around for several years.

If you want to see how your own story stacked up against the competition, go to your story, find the date it was published, click the year, month, and day on the archive of the publication and you’ll see all stories published that day. Find where yours is on the list. The stories will be listed from most read to least read. Remember, they are listed by reads, not by views or claps.

Seeing that the most popular stories are the older ones, let it be a reminder to all you Medium writers that writing on this platform is a long-term game. Keep at it!

I hope you found this article helpful. If you want to know exactly how many followers a publication has, there’s a little trick for that too:

How to Find the Number of Followers for Any Medium Publication

If you enjoyed this story, perhaps you should join J.A. Taylor’s Monthly Reader’s Club and read all his stories free?