Recently I have been seeing the following banner popup when I read Medium stories:
I don’t use Medium seriously, I’m not a paying member, and I haven’t monetised any of my posts. However, I still get about 100 reads/week:
When I first saw the banner that I need to start paying a monthly fee to read articles on Medium, I was confused because I was clearly getting quite a few reads. I was producing content that was drawing readers to Medium but I couldn’t read articles on Medium without paying them. What was perplexing is that there didn’t seem to be an obvious explanation why. And I’m still not sure after reading their terms of service. Medium’s terms of service are very clearly written but don’t address the most basic concept of the site which is why I’m publishing content for free but have to pay to read other people’s articles?
Being a bit naive to how Medium works, I tried to decipher it a little further. It appears that I only get the above banner for starred articles, like this one:
However, this one I can read (which isn’t starred):
So I assume I can read non-starred articles but not starred articles. However this isn’t explained in Medium’s banner. The banner gives me the impression that not only am I working for free for Medium, but I also have to pay them to use their service. The reality is that it is more balanced, I post free content and can read other free content. I’m not clear though whether if I monetise articles whether I can now read other people’s monetised articles, or do I still have to pay for that?
Given these questions are at the very core of Medium’s service, I would’ve thought they would do a better job of explaining it.
My assumption is that Medium may now have a monopoly on its domain. Companies that dominate their domain, such as YouTube, ebay, Google, etc. start to do things where the customer isn’t the top priority, which definitely shows in this case.
Medium is a wonderful piece of software and works incredibly well for sharing ideas. I’m just a little confused how it works…
