Why The “Power Law” Rules Medium

A tiny handful of hits, and tons of misses

I’ve been publishing on Medium, on and off, for eight years.

I started back in 2014, when I spent a year writing posts as part of a group tech blog, “The Message”. Around 2019 I used it for a bit of personal blogging. Then last year I started up again in earnest; these days I post three times a week, so most of my Medium posts are from the last six months. In total, I’ve written 108 pieces on Medium.

So, what does the traffic look like?

Behold the chart above. I took the numbers off my internal Medium dashboard and generated that dataviz — sorting my posts from the most popular to the least. Apologies for the ugliness of the chart.

But you may recognize the shape it makes!

It’s called a “power law” distribution.

And odds are it’s what your traffic looks like, too.

“Odds are.” How can I be so confident about that bold proclamation, you may ask?

Because we see power laws everywhere in the world of culture. Whenever you have a) a cultural marketplace with b) tons of offerings that are c) competing for the scarce attention of the audience, you tend to see power laws.