Medium Publication Finder: Subscribers & Activity

What does Medium Publication Finder: Subscribers & Activity do?

Medium Publication Finder turns a keyword (or a list of publication names) into one scorecard row per Medium publication: how many people follow it, how often it posts, when it last posted, how many claps a typical story gets, how much of it sits behind the paywall, and who writes for it. It reads the public data Medium serves to any visitor, so there is no login, no API key and no Medium account involved. Export the rows as JSON, CSV or Excel, call the Actor through the Apify API, or connect it to n8n, Make and AI agents through MCP.

Why use Medium Publication Finder?

Medium search lists publications by relevance and shows nothing about whether they are alive. This Actor adds the part you need to decide where to spend time: cadence and engagement computed from the latest 25 posts of each publication.

• Build a pitch list. Search a topic, keep publications with a few hundred to a few thousand followers that posted this month, and rank them by claps per 1,000 subscribers.
• Drop dormant giants. A publication with 800,000 followers and no post for a year is a bad target. Set "Posted within the last (days)" and it disappears.
• Benchmark competitors and sponsors. Compare posts per week, median claps, responses and member-only share across a shortlist of publications in your niche.
• Find the editors. Each row carries the creator, the editors and the most frequent authors with their usernames.
• Feed dashboards and agents. One flat row per publication, stable field names, no article dumps to post-process.

Example output

name	subscribers	postsPerWeek	daysSinceLastPost	activityStatus	medianClaps	medianClapsPer1kSubscribers	memberOnlySharePct
Midwest Startups	389	0.2	4.4	active	2	5.14	0
The Startup	894499	1	134.5	dormant	269	0.3	68
UX Collective	634782	13.99	0.1	active	98	0.15	48

{
  "query": "startup",
  "id": "30498dc3bd26",
  "slug": "midwest-startups",
  "name": "Midwest Startups",
  "url": "https://medium.com/midwest-startups",
  "customDomain": null,
  "tagline": "Navigating the ever-growing Midwest startup ecosystem.",
  "subscribers": 389,
  "creatorUsername": "midweststartups",
  "editorsCount": 5,
  "postsSampled": 25,
  "sampleSpanDays": 865.5,
  "lastPostAt": "2026-10-02T15:55:56.171Z",
  "daysSinceLastPost": 4.4,
  "postsPerWeek": 0.2,
  "activityStatus": "active",
  "medianClaps": 2,
  "averageClaps": 12.6,
  "medianClapsPer1kSubscribers": 5.14,
  "medianResponses": 0,
  "memberOnlySharePct": 0,
  "distinctAuthors": 2,
  "topAuthors": [{ "username": "midweststartups", "name": "Midwest Startups", "posts": 22 }],
  "topTags": [{ "tag": "startup", "posts": 22 }, { "tag": "venture-capital", "posts": 18 }],
  "bestPost": { "title": "2024 Best of the Midwest: Startup City Rankings", "claps": 139 },
  "found": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-07T02:17:41.511Z"
}

How much does it cost?

You pay for each publication row that is delivered, with a lower price on paid Apify plans. Keywords with no matches, publications that do not exist and publications removed by your filters come back as status rows or are skipped, and none of them is charged. Set a maximum spend on the run and the Actor stops when it is reached. The Actor uses plain HTTP requests, so a run of twenty publications takes seconds and uses very little memory.

Input

• Search keywords – topics to search publications for, one per line. Each keyword is searched separately.
• Publications to look up – slugs (better-programming), links (https://medium.com/swlh) or custom domains (uxdesign.cc). Profiles of people (@name) are not publications and are ignored.
• Publications per keyword – how many publications to score per keyword, in Medium's ranking order, 1 to 100.
• Recent posts to analyse – how many recent posts feed the metrics, 5 to 25.
• Minimum / maximum subscribers – skip publications outside the range; skipped publications are not charged.
• Posted within the last (days) – keep only publications whose newest post is at most this old.
• Maximum publications – total limit of rows per run.
• Proxy configuration – optional; use it if Medium refuses requests from your region.

Output fields

Each row has the publication identity (id, slug, name, url, customDomain, tagline, description), people (creatorUsername, creatorName, editorsCount, editors, twitterUsername, newsletterSlug), size (subscribers), cadence (postsSampled, sampleSpanDays, lastPostAt, daysSinceLastPost, postsPerWeek, activityStatus), engagement (medianClaps, averageClaps, medianClapsPer1kSubscribers, medianResponses), content (medianReadingMinutes, medianWords, memberOnlySharePct, distinctAuthors, topAuthors, topTags, bestPost) and the run context (query, found, sourceUrl, scrapedAt). When nothing can be returned for an input you get one row with found: false, a reason and a message: noMatches (the keyword found no publications), filteredOut (publications were found but none passed your filters), notFound (no such slug or domain) or fetchFailed (Medium did not answer after retries).

How the metrics are computed

Medium serves at most 25 recent posts per publication, so all cadence and engagement figures describe that sample. postsPerWeek is the number of sampled posts divided by the time between the oldest sampled post and now, and sampleSpanDays tells you how long that window is. activityStatus is active when the newest post is at most 14 days old, slowing up to 60 days and dormant beyond that. medianClapsPer1kSubscribers divides the median claps of the sample by followers, which makes small and large publications comparable.

Limits

• The sample is the latest 25 posts; the Actor cannot page further back.
• Medium does not publish submission guidelines or acceptance rates, so the rows do not say whether a publication takes pitches. They tell you whether it is alive and how its stories perform.
• Clap counts are Medium's public totals and can be zero for publications whose readers rarely clap.
• Subscriber counts are Medium's follower numbers at the time of the run.

Is it legal to scrape Medium publications?

The Actor reads only public publication data that Medium serves to anyone without logging in. It does not read member-only story text, private data or anything behind a login, and it does not bypass access controls. You are responsible for using the data in line with applicable laws, including data protection rules, and Medium's terms. If you find an issue, open it in the Issues tab; problems are answered within one business day.

FAQ

Why is a publication missing from my results? Either Medium search did not return it for your keyword, or it was removed by your subscriber or activity filters. If every publication is removed you get one filteredOut row explaining it.

Why are median claps zero? Many publications get few claps. Look at averageClaps and bestPost to see whether a few stories carry the engagement. A missing value is never reported as zero: if Medium returns no clap count for any post, the field is null and the status message shows the clap-count coverage.

Does it return articles? No. It scores publications. Use an article scraper when you need story text.

How fresh is the data? Every run reads Medium live.

Can I schedule runs? Yes, use Apify schedules to track how follower counts and cadence change.

Something looks wrong. Open an issue with the input you used; layout changes at Medium are fixed quickly.

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See other data Actors from the same publisher on the Store profile.