Argh! Fixed now - sorry about that. Pressed the wrong button when publishing on Medium (ps I really like Medium, sometimes it gets a bit of a rap, but it’s very easy to write and they are quite user friendly in my opinion at least :)
To be picky, Medium may be writer-friendly but never was really reader-friendly. The page are heavy with banners blocking the view, no possibilities to know in advance which article is paywalled or not. I do not have a problem with authors publishing on Medium, just Medium itself.
I agree with you, it’s not perfect for readers and until I caved and signed up as a member, I also was annoyed at hitting my monthly limit of articles.
They have amazing SEO so inevitably many articles I need while researching a solution led me to Medium.com
It’s just a very hard market to serve (long form reading / journalism etc). That’s why I’m not that bullish on substack because it’s hard to make it good for readers and profitable for writers / the startup.
Medium paid me $10, and I have about 10,000 reads in the last year. I didn’t do it for the money, but that’s an indication for those who do want to write for a side income - it’s a hard business.
For writing, its very good - to the extent, I use it as one of my main word processors lol. Then just copy it to something else for formatting. Very distraction free and the font is nice to make you want to write more.
It would be great if a new competitor did what Medium did, but made it better for readers. IMO the business model should be like Wordpress but for writers, together with an overall platform with high quality SEO. Make the money selling the software and a bit with memberships on the main site.
I feel for Medium and it’s writers - there’s so little money in it, that to some extent they have to resort to click bait titles, bad UI for readers, and high amount of not amazing quality content.
