Platforms are fond of selling publishers on their reach, but they don’t always deliver. In April, a batch of small publishers migrated to Medium in the hopes that the platform’s network effect would increase their reach. But seven months after the move, comScore and Alexa data show that several of these publishers have seen their traffic decline. Of the 16 largest publishers on Medium that have existed for at least a year, nine of them (56 percent) have seen their Alexa rank plummet, four of them have seen their rank increase (25 percent) and three have seen their rank fluctuate in no clear discernible pattern (19 percent). A source familiar with Medium publishers’ traffic said that third-party providers do not typically account for app traffic, so Medium’s reach is likely greater than third-party data indicates. However, a comScore’s data takes app traffic into account. But either way, even with those caveats in mind, third-party data does not paint a pretty picture for the publishing platform.
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