Going viral on Medium. How did it happen and can it be replicated?

Writing about going viral on Medium isn’t all just a big gloat, I swear. Not entirely, anyway. It is to encourage anyone who might be on Medium that one random unpredictable story can suddenly go viral. There is no way to predict this, so the only thing you can do is just keep plugging away.

This happened a couple of weeks ago and it was this story that did it for me:

I don’t write much on Medium compared to some. There are writers there that write an article or two a day. I wrote two for the whole of November. So far this month, I have written seven. The ones I thought were fascinating, didn’t do as well as others I thought were ok.

One day, I read an interesting article about the Sistine Chapel and it talked briefly about how the photography ban in the Chapel began. It was all down to a Japanese TV company’s rights. It was interesting, so I did research and wrote a story. It was mentioned by an editor in a newsletter roundup thing. I have been in a few of them and thought nothing of it.

That evening I noticed it had taken off with 500 views in one day. I’ve had stories hit that before but it normally took weeks. By the time I went to bed there were 3000 reads. Which was incredible.

The next day it hit around 12000 reads and was officially viral. It was pretty amazing. I have been published in national newspapers before but there was something incredibly exciting about seeing your stats rise minute by minute. Also, unlike getting paid a monthly salary or flat rate for a story, this was amount amount that kept going up.

It spiked pretty fast and then slowly calmed down. It is still making money though and that is one of the things I love about Medium. Not only can one article make you a sudden burst of money, it can keep earning for months. I have an article called ‘The King Of Prussia Hired, Kidnapped And Bred Giant Soldiers‘ that I wrote on the 6th October, that is still making me money. Nothing like the Sistine Chapel story but over time it has been a good earner.

So what happened and can it be replicated?

I can think it was a random alignment of many things that I am going to try and replicate. My stories generally do ok and I do the following thing for each:

• They are between 800 to 1200 words. This equates to 5 or 6 minutes of reading time. This isn’t a hard and fast rule for me as The Incredibly Polite Invasion of Iceland was 2000 words and 9 minutes of reading time and that has been doing ok.
• It has to interest me. This is probably the most important aspect as I think your interest shows in your writing. Fortunately, I am interested in a lot of things.
• Do proper research and write a proper article. Include references and use something like Grammarly to ensure there are no mistakes.

I think there is one final factor that really helped. A lot of people have been to the Sistine Chapel and have experienced the ‘no photo’ ban and so may have been curious as to its origins. The article also had a lot of comments as people were keen to share their own stories. This shared experience is quite compelling.

I don’t know if this will help you go viral, but I think many of the points will help. If I somehow replicate that success, I will be overjoyed and will share what factors were similar. It’s like science. In the meantime, the only definite thing to do is write a lot and make sure it is quality.

Good luck.