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Vanity Metrics Are The Best Metrics. Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise.
Please Stop Calling Them Vanity Metrics. They’re Inspiration Metrics.
When it comes to content analytics, the ‘pros’ have a term for data that seem impressive but tell you very little about the user experience or the quality of your content.
“Vanity metrics.”
It’s a term that describes things like claps, likes, comments, ‘hits’, and other metrics that don’t provide real insight into the content’s actual value. They say you shouldn’t use these data to understand what actually works and what doesn’t in your writing.
“Amateurs use these metrics to stroke their egos,” they say. “Instead, we should be focused on better data, like read time, subscribes, and sales.”
I’ll agree with that to an extent. But I also stand by “vanity metrics” without apology.
I give clicks and read time much higher value when making decisions about what to write moving forward. And Medium seems to agree. That’s why they recently changed how writers get paid. Rather than basing your pay on claps and comments, the primary metric used to determine your compensation now is reading time.
