[Chyzwar]

You miss the point. Adds are not to make you buy product. They primary focus is building brand and product awareness. When you next time buy Certain Thing you will subconsciously pick product from the brand you received 6 months of adds. Just check your shopping basket next time in supermarket, most products will be branded well advertised and pretty packaged. Humans are really shallow...

Medium is failing because they are overspending and do not have really a product. Medium should have light adds and option for add-free subscription. It should share some profit with best writers to create more high quality content. Medium should have also agreements with mainstream media to republish some articles. And finally they should have enough machine learning and with twitter that they should own PR.