Hey Carol, here's my two cents because I have thought about this since the subscription thing started. It boils down to the question of what Medium wants to be.

Does it want to be a "writers collective" or a "writers marketplace"?

These are very different models with very different reward mechanisms for participants. I would say that Medium used to be a writer's collective and is moving in the direction of Substack towards becoming a writers marketplace.

In a marketplace model, Medium simply provides a platform for you to set up shop. If you have ever worked a flea market (I did for years helping my mother) you know how it works..

They make their money by renting you the space and providing a crowd. The rest is up to you.

In this case you get 50% and they get 50%. Which BTW is about the cut brothels in Nevada take (the things you can learn on television these days). That's actually a fairly generous split.

If you are a big name writer that people sign up to follow. You can really make bank. If you have followers who are that into you, start telling them to send you money so you can write for them. It's a great model for you.

What it does though is suck money out of the overall pool for the "writer's collective" portion of Medium.

Here's an example. Suppose I suddenly got crazy successful and 10,000 people signed up for Medium mostly just to read my work (fantasy of course, I am not a popular guy).

Under the old "writers collective" model all of their "dues" go into the common pot. Medium takes its cut for running the platform and all the "qualifying writers" get paid based on the views/reads mechanism.

The bigger the common pot. The bigger the payouts can be.

In the market model. I get to keep half of those readers "dues" for myself. That's 25K a month for me! But that money comes "off the top" and doesn't do anything for the rest of the writers in the market.

Medium then gets their cut, and what's leftover is what gets put in the collective pot. Obviously it's going to be a smaller amount.

That's why your earnings are crashing. The writers with subscription fan bases are basically pulling money out of the system.

You can think about this in a number of ways. I am still not sure how I think/feel about it.

But that's what's happening.