How I Increased the Medium Read Ratio Without Changing the Story
I recently published a story in P.S. I Love You, originally entitled How to Be Powerful in Relationship, and was then surprised to discover that, even though it was getting a lot of views, it was being read much less than I expected. Confused, I reached out to my friends on Facebook for help:
Hey y’all, does anybody want to help me out with something related to my writing? / Please could I have some help?
Something strange is happening with the following article. It’s had 3,410 views but only 174 reads. This represents an extremely low reads-per-view (5%). My articles usually have reads-per-view of between 25% and 78%, most often around 40%.
I don’t know if people are clicking on the article and bookmarking it to read on the weekend. If this is true, then the reads-per-view may increase later. It’s also possible that there is something really off-putting in the content of the article or in the relationship between the picture/title and the content.
Is there something about this article that would likely make someone view it, but then stop reading it part-way through?
Note that for the people who do read through it, 16% clap, which is a normal fans-per-read.
I have been through this article many times, and I have thoroughly reviewed and revised it. It should be really high quality, informative, and a pleasure to read. However, all this work does not seem to have increased the reads-per-view.
The request generated several observations. One that really stood out was from my friend Robbie, an astute observer of human nature. He wrote:
… I noticed reading the first three paragraphs … that the writing was masculine, [whereas] the headline appealed to the feminine. This is of course terribly subjective and [your mileage may well vary], but I think in general your writing style is masculine: linear, rational, explanatory. And this headline seems more likely to draw in readers operating in their feminine. So I can imagine someone getting turned on by the headline, clicking through and then losing interest because of the tone. This is a guess, and it would be really interesting to see a gender breakdown of the analytics.
The original version of this article had been written as a response to a question from a reader of another one of my articles about relationship. Because the foundation of this article was to explain something—rather than to tell a story or reveal my feelings—it has a particularly masculine flavor. I quickly looked for, and found, some evidence to support this hypothesis:
I just looked at the names of the people who have clapped for “How to Be Powerful In Relationship.” There is a surprising number of male first names, assuming that the publication demographic is female. So that supports the hypothesis.
I suddenly became aware of something that should have been obvious to me. Two of the main publications that I have been writing for are very different in this regard: P.S. I Love You and Hacker Noon. The first appeals much more to the feminine perspective, while the latter appeals much more to the masculine. I realized that I had written a very masculine Hacker Noon style article about relationship, and published it in P.S. I Love You, which appeals more to the feminine.
At this point, I had two choices: I could either re-write the article from scratch to appeal to the feminine, or I could change the title to draw in more people who are seeking a masculine perspective. I chose the latter, and changed the title to The Most Important Relationship Skill. This title implies that the article is going to explain something and teach a skill, and not just any skill, but the most important relationship skill. This title will, of course, appeal to any self-respecting lumberjack.
Rather than just changing the title, I decided to run an experiment. This was my first real experiment on Medium. Before making the change, I captured all of the stats for the article. Then I made the changes, waited for some time, and compared the original stats with the change in stats following the change in title. As with any good scientific experiment, I made sure to change only one parameter at a time, and this time I changed only the title. Here are the results of the experiment:
Notice that the reads-per-view jumped from 6% to 20%, which is still relatively low, yet still much higher than 6%. The way that the number of reads dropped after the change was normal and expected and was related to the article aging.
Even though the number of views naturally dropped by 38%, the number of reads increased by 90%. I want to emphasize here that changing the title did not appear to have a significant effect on the number of views, yet the number of reads increased massively, even while the number of views dropped.
It’s like the article was changed simply by changing the title. In fact, what I believe changed is the demographic that was drawn-in by the title. It seems that the changed demographic was more interested in reading about relationship from a masculine perspective.
This article has now had 13.2K views and 2.8K reads. Despite its shaky start, it now has an overall average reads-per-view of 22%, which is roughly the same as the reads-per-view that the article was experiencing in the experiment after changing the title. And as I write this, the article has received 4,462 claps, which is more than any other article I currently have on Medium.
One final thought: reads-per-view is still relatively low for this article compared with my others. Another observation that my friend Robbie made was that this article does not start with a personal story, unlike my other articles. That might be a factor that is contributing to the wide range of reads-per-view ratios that I see across my articles. I plan to pay attention to the correlation between reads-per-view and whether the article starts with a personal story or not.
Conclusions
- You can change how your story is received by readers just by changing its title.
- Science the shit out of things every now and then.
- Clap effusively for this article. Go ahead and test the 50-clap limit.
- Follow me here on Medium, to get more goodies like this.
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