What Medium's Most Popular Post of the Year Tells Us About the Platform's Purpose

We talk to Matt Higginson, Medium's head of political outreach.

On Medium, the currency is time. It is so for readers, who are told when they click into a post the time it will take them to read to completion. It is so for Medium staff, who treat the minutes their audience spends reading posts as the most important metric of its success.

“We pay more attention to time spent reading than number of visitors at Medium because, in a world of infinite content — where there are a million shiny attention-grabbing objects a touch away and notifications coming in constantly — it’s meaningful when someone is actually spending time,” wrote Medium founder and CEO Evan Williams in a post last year explaining why Medium relies on that measure, which it calls total time reading, or TTR.

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