Featured

Making Featured stories even more visible

Introducing new push notifications and Featured story feeds for publication followers

Melissa DePuydt
The Medium Blog
2 min read1 day ago

--

A few months ago, we launched Featured stories for publications as a way for publication editors to directly influence story recommendations for their followers. Since then, our team has released multiple improvements, making Featured stories visible in stats and post page labels.

Now, we’re excited to give Featured stories even wider distribution and more prominent placement on each user’s logged-in Homepage — great news for both writers and readers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out new Featured story push notifications and new “Featured” story Homepage feeds for publication followers.

For writers, this means even more people seeing your Featured stories. For readers, it will be easier than ever to see Featured stories from all of the publications you follow.

An illustration of a Featured story push notification for a publication follower.
Images created by Jason Combs and Jon Wong

In addition to being recommended more highly in Digest emails, the For You feed, and publication story pages, Featured stories now will be pushed directly to a publication’s followers via in-app notifications. Followers with the Medium app installed on iOS or Android also can receive Featured story push notifications whenever a publication they follow features a story.

An illustration of the Medium homepage feeds, including For you, Following, and the new Featured feed.

Featured stories also will appear in the new Featured tab on the homepage for logged-in users. Unlike many of Medium’s other feeds, which include content recommendations from the Medium algorithm and our in-house curation team, the Featured feed highlights all Featured stories from publications that a user follows in the order they were featured. This means readers will never miss out on seeing a publication’s Featured story.

The Featured feed is another way that Medium is investing in both publications and human curation. Publication editors play an important role in understanding what kind of content is uniquely valuable to their readers. By giving publication editors more control over the content that followers of the publication see on Medium, we are excited to help even more stories find the right audience. To learn more about Featured stories, check out the help center.

P.S. We’ve had the Featured feed turned on for Medium staff for about a month now. What started as a staff-only prototype made its way to production pretty quickly after we had the chance to experience it. Trust us when we say that it has become a go-to source of reading material for many of us!

--

--

Melissa DePuydt
Melissa DePuydt

Written by Melissa DePuydt

Director of Engineering at Medium. Previously: Engineering at Upstatement, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

Responses (25)