Reach your readers without having to master marketing
You have a good story to tell and you want to make sure the right readers find it.
Who are the right readers? You know them: The ones who are in the stage of life you’ve just passed. The ones struggling with the problem you solved. The ones feeling like they’re the only people in the world with that particular problem, but you’re in those trenches with them. You write a story for that reader and you want to make sure they find it.
Maybe you want to talk about how playing D&D with your kids made you a better creative director. Maybe you worked for Pope Francis and want to share your perspective on what he was really like. Or maybe you were detained by ICE for two weeks, and know others need to hear about your unimaginable experience.
But you don’t know any of those readers, and none of them follow you yet. You’re not a growth hacker. You don’t have a big list of email subscribers. You don’t know anything about SEO. You’ve never written a clickbait title in your life, and you don’t have a content calendar. You just have a story, or many stories, and the desire to share your experiences with others.
Here’s how Medium is built to help your story find its audience.
How your story finds the right readers
We recommend millions of stories to millions of readers every month without writers doing much in the way of marketing themselves.
The combination of the algorithmic and human curation tools we’ve built means that you can come to Medium with no audience, but still find readers who resonate with your story. Then, readers who want to stay up to date with you have easy ways to continue to see your writing, and you can build your audience.
The great thing about publishing your story on Medium is that you don’t need to know anything about our recommendations system. But if you want to know more about how it all works, here’s the behind-the-scenes breakdown of the ways readers find your writing.
Through direct recommendations: Topics, email, and publications
When you press publish on your Medium story, it appears to Medium readers through a few different paths. When you add topics to your stories, like technology, readers who follow that topic, or frequently choose to read stories in that topic, might be shown your story.
Gif of our topics pages
Based on the topics our readers have told us they’re interested in, we’ll show your story to relevant readers in places like the Medium homepage, in the Medium app, and in the Daily or Weekly Digest emails we send out. For example, we send out over a million unique stories every month in the Daily and Weekly Digest emails. If you publish in a publication, which is a themed collection of stories on Medium, readers who follow that pub might see your story, even if they don’t follow you.
If readers want to see more of your work, they’ll follow you and can also opt in to get email notifications for your new stories.
Through humans: Boost and curation
Medium’s unique distribution system combines algorithmic recommendations with human curation. Our curation team reviews stories, and our Boost nominators also nominate stories to be “Boosted” (which means presented to more readers). We also curate stories in different spaces across the site, like Staff Picks, lists, and the Medium Newsletter.
Some examples:
republished her newsletter, “How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent,” as a story on Medium, which was Boosted and included in Staff Picks, ultimately reaching over 10k readers from Medium
’s excellent story on writing “How I” stories was seen by over a thousand additional Medium readers eight months after it was published when we linked it in a December issue of the Medium newsletters.
published her first story on Medium in April 2025, when she didn’t hear back from The Chronicle of Higher Education about an op-ed submission. Within a few weeks, she was reaching the readers she’d hoped to with her stories about structural skills on Medium instead. “[T]he audience showing up for this work isn’t just intellectually curious. They are decision-makers, system-builders, and problem-solvers at the intersection of tech, transformation, and leadership,” she added in her write-up of her publishing experience.
wrote about her experience working at Valve, a now extremely successful gaming studio. Our curators discovered that story and Boosted it to reach 32k Medium readers.
