However you feel about curation on Medium, especially lately, the distribution system is still, in 2022, one of the main ways to grow your reach and audience on this platform quickly.
Sure, distribution might not always yield the desired results. I have even seen some reports of distribution completely killing an article’s growth. In my experience, judging from over 350 written stories in almost 1.5 years on this platform, I can safely say:
Distribution is the main reason for my success.
Well, distribution and my consistent output.
Why?
Curated stories don’t die down quickly.
At least for me, they don’t. Views and reads keep growing. Furthermore, on multiple occasions, I had pieces going viral a long time after they were published. Mostly due to curation.
What is curation
With distribution and curation on Medium, I’m referring to the official distribution system of Medium. Curated stories get the phrase “Chosen for further distribution” on their stats page.
This is the main distribution system. Often criticized by other writers and regularly changed by Medium.
Other forms of curation
What you might not know is that Medium has other forms of “distribution” as well. These would be the recommendedsections. Recommendations are based on your reading behavior, i.e., the authors you follow and read, the tags you gravitate to, your reading history, and more.
You frequently find “Selected for you”, “Based on your reading history,” “XXX highlighted”, “From your network”, and other phrases below story headline on your home feed.
This is your personal distribution system.
And it does work. It drives views. It mainly relies on recommendations within your network, though. Meaning most stories you encounter here will be written by authors you follow, subscribe to, or read in the past.
Sometimes, new authors find their way in here as well. Based on tags and the topic of their posts.
Over all, though, Medium’s official distribution is better at driving new readers to your stories. Distributed stories will get shown throughout the Medium experience to all readers, whether they belong to your network or not. That’s a plus.
How to get curated
Chances of getting curated by Medium have decreased in recent times, I believe. This might be due to the increase in overall writers on this platform, the increase in story output, or even due to writing quality (or growing lack thereof).
Automatic curation
Some time in the past, Medium seemed to have implemented an auto-curation algorithm.
What’s that?
Curated stories used to be picked exclusively by hand (as far as I’m aware), by human editors. They still are. But additionally, Medium automatically curates stories with the help of an algorithm.
Now, I’m obviously not sure how this algorithm works. I know it exists (and came into existence during my first few months here), because over a period of time, my stories automatically got curated minutes or at most 1–2 hours after I published them. No way, a human editor was that quick all the time.
I’ve heard this from others authors as well. This must have happened because many of my stories got curated by hand before that and I “made” it onto the algorithm whitelist. Something like that.
This doesn’t happen to me anymore. I don’t know whether Medium changed this automatic curation algorithm, or whether I’m just not in it anymore, but I’m not getting it recently.
Since this doesn’t work for me now, there is one other way that guarantees automatic distribution.
Automatic publication curation
Publications are still huge on Medium and this is one of the main reasons. Some large publications have an automatic curation bonus.
Whenever you publish with one of these publication, your story will get curated automatically.
Better Marketing is one of those publications. I used to get it when I wrote for P.S. I Love You (they’re closed now) and The Ascent (also closed).
I can’t give you a list of all pubs that have this. I’d imagine there are quite a few more. Start it up must be one of them, Curious could be too.
If you have more information, my lovely followers, don’t hesitate to share those with me and the readers in the comments! I’d love to collect a list of all pubs that have automatic curation.
At least for me, this automatic curation works 100% of the time. Each Better Marketing story gets curated instantly. And it works. My Better Marketing stories are by far my most viewed, most popular, and highest earnings stories on Medium.
A word of warning though. Automatic curation does not mean Medium can’t take it away. De-curation is a thing. I’ve had this happen a few times as well.
The bottom line
Distribution is confusing. It gets bashed a lot on Medium. I, however, do believe curation is an extremely important part of the Medium’s system and for growing your audience and reach.
So, how do you get curated? Three steps:
- Follow the distribution guide to be eligible for curation
- Get curated a lot and make it onto the curation whitelist (if that still exists)
- Get into publications who have automatic curation
Have more tips? Please share your insights! I’d love to get a deeper insight into curation on Medium.
