Why do certain articles do better?

I’m mystified. Maybe I shouldn’t be.

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

While most of the articles I’ve published on Medium have not done all that well, a few have astonished me by high readership volumes. The first time it happened I was writing about French women’s peeing habits:

French Women Pee Standing Up

The next time, I penned something about Meghan Markle:

Why I don’t care about Meghan Markle’s suffering

And the third time, it had to do with a film crew filming in Afghanistan:

CNN film crew does NOTHING as little girl is sold to old man

The thing is, each of these articles were written rapidly. Yet they did a lot better than articles for which I did a great deal…