This was published on August 4, 2014 on Hatch, our internal version of Medium. It is unedited except for a small redaction. See Hatching Inside Medium for context on this collection.
Top 100 Chart-o-nomics
Everyone loves a hot list, real-time charts could make Medium fresher (and more obvious)
We’ve come a long way with the Medium homepage, but we could do so much more with real-time charts. “Writer success” depends on knowing how well one’s story is performing, and we are just scratching the surface of the live data we might provide our users.
Have you seen the recent Billboard Twitter Real-Time Charts?
Even for a casual music fan, it’s quite fun/interesting to click around on it. Users can toggle between Trending 140 (an up to the minute ranking of songs shared in the U.S., measured by acceleration over the past hour), Last 24 Hours (a wider full-day view of the action) and Emerging Artists (the most shared songs on Twitter in the U.S. by up-and-coming artists, a place to showcase independent names).
Side note: I offer no defense for the distasteful and offensive song names (and even artist names) you may see on these charts. The people have spoken, and sadly the creative bar these days is particularly low.
Now imagine the thrill if you are a stakeholder in one of these songs; if you’re the label or the producer or the publisher or the artist? You’d be clicking those tabs like a dedicated datahead, chasing that dopamine high while watching your content perform against the competition in real-time.
Shout out to ███████ and other ongoing projects aimed to enhance contributor stimulus and feedback.
Here’s the key question: Could Medium’s Top 100 chart feature a real-time view?
Perhaps it could offer different views based on time frame, as the Billboard/Twitter chart does?
For readers on Medium, at the moment it seems like our Top 20 is one of the best entry points to our universe. Adding more options and more real-time action would make the reader’s entryway much more interesting.
For writers and collection editors, real-time Top 100 charts would create a visceral incentive to engage with the platform, to push the content on social media, to be bigger and better and stronger.
Perhaps we can also draw some inspiration from the value of this new kind of dynamic chart within the music industry itself, and apply that to Medium’s business-side goals.
With the huge volume of music chatter on Twitter — and the obvious potential value of harnessing and quantifying all that buzz — a proposed collaboration with Billboard had been brewing for some time. The result was the new, innovative chart referenced above, launched only a couple months ago.
The music industry is built around charts — radio charts, video charts and most importantly record sales charts. For decades the industry has relied on Billboard to tabulate the popularity of song and albums, to present the most reliable and consistent chart data. Over time Billboard has broadened and tweaked its formula to accommodate changes in technology and user listening habits.
In recent years Billboard launched new charts called the Social 50, On-Demand Songs and Streaming Songs, all aimed at capturing more of the real-time action.
Of course, another important platform for the music industry with valuable real-time chart action is iTunes.
The iTunes store offers real-time listings of Top Songs and Top Albums in multiple music genres. This list has become the music industry’s most accurate barometer of actual record sales, and for that reason it is monitored constantly. The iTunes Podcast section also features important and much-observed rankings within various categories.
I propose Medium gets with the real-time flow and applies some of these emerging tools and techniques to make our Top 100 the place where writers and readers gather to see what matters.
