Saturdays Are Weird On Medium
With Medium publishing, there are very few reliable patterns I have seen over 8 years, but this one is pretty consistent…
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This is not an article. This is one of those rare blogposts I sometimes publish. I seldomly write about Medium itself, and it’s not like I think it’s beneath me or something, it’s just not my niche. There are plenty of other writers out there who do really well with meta posts, like Susie Kearley while also keeping it real and ethical. I would rather not steal the limelight away from them. But this one, this one I gotta write, because in eight years of writing on this platform, this is probably the only consistent pattern I recognise. However, given that there is no forum functionality on Medium, this is my way of asking the community whether the pattern is anecdotal or real.
Consistent weirdness
Saturdays are weird. Genuinely. I won’t speak for my first seven years on this platform, as I don’t think it really matters. Also, the average number of monthly posts has gone from 1.5 to 20, and with that, my attention to stats heightened. Since I went behind the paywall in October 2021, I check my stats daily, partly because I am curious, partly because I like to understand the data it provides me. Maybe there is something to learn from it, or perhaps there isn’t.
So far, the only real thing I seem to have learnt is that Saturdays are weird as fuck. In what way? Let me put it succinctly. My average read rate is somewhere around 400–450 reads / day. I can almost bet that 7–8 Saturdays out of 10, it will fall noticeably, sometimes even below 300, and 2–3 Saturdays out of 10, it will spike to 1000+ reads.
The Sundays after a dip, will 99.9% of the time will see a resurgence to my usual average, however in the case of a spike, Sundays will outperform the rest of the week, as if they were riding on the coattails of the inexplicably high read-counts of the previous Saturday.
