There's never been an issue with making money....at least not until last December. The Boost program (which I've been against since it launched) has killed revenue for non-boosted articles...and now even boosted articles make peanuts (Tony constantly touting it as his grand achievement is a massive tone deaf red flag). Opening to the 70+ countries has proven to be nothing but a money grab.

But really, I have two problems with Medium. Beyond pay taking a massive drop (and the platform refusing to address it), stories simply aren't being distributed to subscribers. My analytics show maybe 1% of my subs actually open new articles. With Substack it's 40-50% easily. It's disheartening to put a lot of mental energy into a personal story and only have 12 people out of almost 21K open it.

Of course, I like the setup and general Idea of Medium. Substack feels like a social media platform that nobody knows how to use. It does have a Notes feature, which I like. Makes it easier to send quick little blurbs to subscribers/promote a story, without emailing everyone. Downside is it's been far more difficult to turn followers into paid subs (granted, I only have like 4 paid articles, so that's likely part of it).

I hope Medium can course correct, but after talking to a number of boosters/pub managers, Tony seems like the kind of guy who loves smelling his farts, and it's now all about subscribers and not about the writers. It's a major bummer, but I think long term success is likely in Substack. At the very least you do collect the email address of every sub. So, even if that platform goes down you can still distribute your stories.