How a design change is leading to 7x more email subscribers across Medium
More consistent access to your readership through emails
As a writer, you want your readers to easily find and read your stories, and we at Medium want the same thing. Last month, we made a product change to make it easier for readers to stay up to date with your latest stories. Now, when readers follow you, they can subscribe to notifications about every new story you publish.
Since we released that feature, we’ve seen a 7x increase in the number of email subscribers. In short, readers are choosing to get notified about your latest writing a lot more than they were before.
We expect that number to go up even more, as we’ve added that new flow all over Medium — in the search results, the home page, the notifications page, both on the web page and in the app.
When readers control their emails, your reach increases
We know readers want to have control over who they follow and how they get your stories. Writers want more of their readers to have a direct line to their writing. As we tested this new feature, we found that readers were much more likely to subscribe to get your story updates if they don’t have to provide an email address.
That’s why we decided that for these new email notifications, writers would no longer get direct access to these email addresses or be able to download them.
We know some writers are trying to use Medium to grow their owned email lists — if that’s you, and you’re frustrated that you can no longer do so on Medium directly, I encourage you to add a link to the newsletter platform you use to your bio, about page, or within your stories to give readers the option to subscribe to your emails there.
Reaching new readers while keeping your readers informed
We built (and are building) Medium to connect your most thoughtful and informed writing to new readers, even if you don’t already have an audience here. That’s what makes it possible for writers to thrive here even if they don’t have an existing audience, nor time to build one.
The downside is that the same system creates inconsistency for writers who do have an audience. To address that inconsistency, we’ve been investing in email as a way for writers to consistently reach their audience, on their readers’ terms.
We’ve been focusing on improving how writers can reach their audience on Medium, and we’re excited to see that writers are feeling more connected to their audience and excited to share their stories after we made the change. The number of stories you publish on Medium has gone up 25% in the last two months (and yes, we checked that that doesn’t include spam!).
We hope these changes will make it even easier for readers who love your work to get your stories as soon as you publish them.
