I published 14 dev.to articles about a single npm package in three weeks. Here is the data on what actually got views.
The numbers
Before I get into what worked, the raw view counts:
| Views | Article | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 122 | I Built a Free Hemingway Editor Alternative That Runs in Your Browser | Narrative |
| 38 | I Let AI Write My Blog Posts, Then Scored Them for Quality — The Results Were Brutal | Narrative |
| 24 | Every Readability Formula Explained (with JavaScript Examples) | Tutorial |
| 24 | How to Score Your Content for Readability and SEO with TypeScript | Tutorial |
| 22 | I Built an npm Package and Tracked Every Download for Two Weeks | Narrative |
| 21 | Add Readability Scoring to Your CI Pipeline (GitHub Actions) | Tutorial |
| 21 | A Developer's Guide to Readability Formulas: Comparing All 8 | Comparison |
| 18 | How to Extract Keywords and Score Content Quality in Node.js | Tutorial |
| 14 | textlens vs text-readability vs natural: Which npm Package for Text Analysis? | Comparison |
| 10 | Sentiment Analysis in Node.js Without External APIs | Tutorial |
| 4 | Build a Hemingway Editor Clone with TypeScript in 50 Lines | Tutorial |
| 4 | I Replaced 5 npm Packages with One for Text Analysis | Comparison |
| 4 | How to Score Text Readability in TypeScript (Zero Dependencies) | Tutorial |
| 3 | Build a Content Quality Checker in 10 Lines of TypeScript | Tutorial |
Total: 329 views across 14 articles.
What formats worked
The data tells a pretty clear story.
Narrative "I Built / I Tracked" articles: 122, 38, 22 views. Average: 60.7 views.
Tutorial "How to" articles: 24, 24, 21, 18, 10, 4, 4, 3 views. Average: 13.5 views.
Comparison articles: 21, 14, 4 views. Average: 13.0 views.
The gap is real. Narrative articles got 4.5x more views on average than tutorials or comparisons.
The highest-performing article — the Hemingway Editor clone writeup — got 122 views. The lowest tutorial got 3. That's a 40x difference.
Turns out, people don't want to read "How to Do X." They want to read "I Did X and Here's What Happened." The story wrapper matters more than I expected.
I'll be honest: I was skeptical. The tutorials had more technical depth. Some of them took longer to write. They got fewer than a quarter of the views.
The unexpected traffic source
Here's the number that surprised me most: Echo JS drove more GitHub traffic than all 14 dev.to articles combined.
GitHub's traffic referrer data showed 18 unique visitors from echojs.com in a single window, versus 0 from dev.to. Stars on textlens jumped from 1 to 6 during that period.
dev.to gives you views. Echo JS gives you GitHub stars.
The mechanism makes sense when you think about it. dev.to readers are often learning or browsing. Echo JS readers are developers actively looking for tools to use. Different intent, different conversion rate.
If your goal is npm downloads or GitHub stars (mine is), Echo JS is a higher-leverage channel than dev.to. But you need the dev.to article first — Echo JS wants a link to share.
What I'd do differently
1. Start with narrative articles. Skip tutorials entirely in the first month. Write the "I built this" story before you write "here's how to use it."
2. Submit to Echo JS the same hour you publish. Don't batch it. The traffic spike is immediate and short. I missed this on most articles.
3. Put at least 3 GitHub links per article. Most of my articles had one link buried at the bottom. The Hemingway article had links in the intro, the feature section, and the conclusion. Higher visibility = more clicks.
4. Track GitHub referrers from day 1. I didn't set up baseline tracking until after launch. I lost data on early traffic sources. Now I watch https://github.com/ckmtools/textlens/graphs/traffic after every post.
The package
I was writing about textlens — zero-dependency text analysis for Node.js. Readability scores, keyword extraction, sentiment, and content quality in one package.
If you want to see what 14 articles actually looks like in practice: github.com/ckmtools/textlens.
Wrote this mostly because I couldn't find honest data about dev.to content marketing for open source tools. Hope it saves someone a few wasted tutorial articles.
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