Here Are The Results

Why Did I Do It?

Short Answer:

I was curious and thought it would make an interesting story.

Long Answer:

I was writing a story about gig economy sites like Fiverr and decided to type Medium into the search bar just to see what’s out there. But these were not the results I was looking for. These were listings for a different kind of Medium — fortunetellers, etc.

So I searched again but this time I typed in Medium article. And sure enough, some listing related to the Medium we all know about popped up.

There were several listings offering writing stories for your brand on Medium as expected. There were some that offered proofreading and editing. But what caught my eye were the listings offering a promotion for your Medium articles.

As the prices were not high, I decided to try one of them out. Worst case scenario I get a good story out of it. Best-case scenario, it actually works.

So what was said in the listing and did it work?

The Listing

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There were some things that got me skeptical right away. Low prices and the grammar in the listings seemed a bit shady, but I decided to go ahead anyway just to see how it works out. I went for the cheapest listing with the most reviews.

Here is the listing:

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I was still very skeptical at this point. But the fact that social media traffic is mentioned gives a small amount of hope that this might be slightly useful.

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I put in an order for the basic package that costs $5. And provided a link to my article. The ones that cost more offered more claps. But that was not what I was interested in. I was curious if they will actually bring in some real traffic, or is it all just going to be fake interactions with my article. With a 1 day delivery time, all of this seemed extremely suspicious.

So I Waited

For the first couple of hours, nothing happened. But then suddenly my article started getting claps. I check in on my stats and followed along with the process. If you are interested in seeing how it worked out, here is the article in question. After about half an hour the claps stopped coming in. And a few comments appeared. I checked the stats of the story again, and here is what I found.

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The views that my article suddenly gained all came from one traffic source. (email, IM, and direct.) Meaning — no social media were used.

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There was also this sudden spike in views. But no actual read time. Simply views. He probably didn’t even open the article just logged into somewhere around 60 Medium accounts and clapped 50 times for my article from each account. And not only were those interactions fake.

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Even the profile pictures for the accounts used were not unique. One last thing to look at is the comments from the supposedly organic traffic.

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As genuine as interactions can get, wouldn’t you agree?

Was It Worth It?

Yes and no. It was definitely not worth it as an actual promotion. The only thing it did was get 3000 claps and 2 fake comments to my article. But it was worth the $5 for me because I got this story out of it. And my curiosity of how this will play out got satisfied. I was skeptical when I decided to do this and the results didn’t surprise me. But I saw some other more promising listings I might try in the future if my readers enjoy reading this article.