How to Find the Number of Followers for Any Medium Publication

Using this little URL trick

Image courtesy of author

If you write on Medium, it’s no secret that getting into publications can boost your visibility, resulting in your work being seen by an otherwise unreachable audience. The ‘I follow you and you’ll follow me’ game doesn’t really work on this platform. Unless you haphazardly go viral, you’ll need to get published in a few publications to garner any attention.

There’s a publication for almost anything you write, but determining which publications are the best fit for your article requires a bit of research. One thing to consider is how many followers a publication has. Not every pub follows the same layout, so sometimes it can be difficult to find the number of followers. But there is a little trick that will show you the number of followers for any 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: /latest to the end of the URL and press enter.

Voila! That will bring you to a version of the publication’s layout that will show you all the latest stories, but on the side of the page, it will display the follower count.

I should mention that while a pub’s follower count is one thing to consider, it should not be your primary focus. Every publication on Medium started small (unless perhaps it was a Medium owned publication). Some of my articles that received the most attention came from smaller publications, while some of my other articles in major publications didn’t stay visible for very long. Here are some publications worth checking out, especially if you are newer to the platform:

Feedium run by J.J. Pryor and Robert Turner has lots of great info about Medium, especially for new writers.

The Friday Fix by Justin Deming is one of my favorite pubs for micro-fiction.

Betterism by Glen Binger is a pub focused on personal growth and development.

If you have some humor pieces, check out The Haven by Page Barnes, and How Pants Work, where Matthew David Brozik is an editor. Mark Starlin has a great little pub called One Minute Wit that even publishes comics.