I’m a sucker for numbers. Stats in particular. I’m always excited to see how my Medium peers are doing.

And now, I have found the perfect tool to stalk all my favorite writers’ stats. Well, at least some of them.

But first

Let’s start with me.

At the time of writing this, I have 9671 Medium followers.

But did you know I had 559 Medium subscribers, the wonderful people who decided to get my post in their inbox?

You didn’t?

There’s a reason for that and an interesting workaround.

While you can see my follower number on my profile, anyone can for that matter, you can’t find my subscriber count there. By design, I would guess. I can see my subscriber count in the backend in the audience stats section, of course. You’ll find yours there.

But did you know there was a way to find out how many subscribers other Medium writers have?

Let me show you!

How

I’ll give you a bombastic example here, from none other than Medium legend, Tim Denning.

Want to guess how many subscribers he has?

Keep in mind that this man has nearly 260K followers. Another mind-blowing stat? To date, Tim has written 2213 Medium stories in total. He’s a machine.

Take a look at this:

Above you can see Tim’s stats.

2213 stories, 259990 followers, and 2086 Medium subscribers.

You also see the crazy amounts of claps, responses and clappers, Tim has accumulated over his time on this platform.

Another example

Fan of Zulie Rane? She’s one of the most popular Medium writers with almost 50K followers and a large catalog of content.

Let’s take a look at her stats:

In her time on Medium, she has written 635 stories and amassed 658 subscribers.

Where did I get these numbers

Now, let’s talk about the tool that generated these screenshots. It’s a Chrome extension, and it’s called Medium Any Author Stats by Bartosz Salwiczek.

This nifty little extension can be used with any Medium writer. Open it when you’re on their profile page and load the author data.

Here’s my page (the real Burk, not the fake one I encountered recently):

You see my subscriber number (559), the total number of stories (352), and my follower count 9671.

What you can’t find, is the referral numbers. Those would be interesting to see as well. I guess it should be possible to collect those via an extension as well, but I’m not sure. Any developers here who could look into this?

The bottom line

Use this tool at your own risk! It might be addictive.

Jokes aside, I do think some of us, Medium writers, have a tendency to compare ourselves to the successful names on this platform. Depending on your mental stage, this will either inspire you or bring you down. In the latter case, please completely ignore me and don’t use this extension.

If stats like these inspire you, try Medium Any Author Stats and show some love to the developer, Bartosz Salwiczek.

It’s a great tool, don’t you think?