[ghalfacree]

Hi, author of the piece here! You're right that WordPress wouldn't have given you a popup before you could read, for free, the article I spent a couple of months working on. It also wouldn't have provided me with any income to support creating the article in the first place.

Medium, on the other hand, does. I mean, it's not much - I get a slice of the revenue from paying subscribers', based on how much they 'applaud' my piece - but it's higher than zero. Despite this, Medium also makes it available to read free of charge for non-members - up to, I believe, a somewhat miserly three articles a month, though you can bypass this if you really must by using a private browsing window to get another three, and another three, and another three, and another three...

I've got kids to feed and bills to pay. If you really don't want to click an X on the login prompt and read it all for free, I can give you my payment details and sell you a PDF copy...

[znpy]

I wouldn’t know. It’s not like I’ve consumed my “fair free share” of your content, I’ve apparently consumed my fair free share of content across all of medium.

Would you accept to be requested documents when you enter the mall? Would you find normal to be stopped by a security guard that says “sir/madame, you’ve browsed enough stores for free without handing in your id card and personal data, please fill this form or leave” ?

I owe you nothing. If anything, you owe me. It’s my time that builds your audience, not the other way around.

[rglullis]

Saying as someone that also detests medium:

- would you mind sharing how much you actually you expect in revenue from this article?

- Have you considered any other ways of monetizing it? Just an idea: if you had your own blog and registered on Brave as a content creator, you could be getting a few cents from me already.

[ghalfacree]

Massively depends on performance. You get money from a subset of a subset of a subset: there's the set of the audience; there's the subset of the audience that are logged in to Medium at the time; there's the subset of the logged-in subset of the audience that bother to click the 'Applaud' button; there's the subset of the bother-to-click-Applaud subset of the logged-in subset of the audience who actually have a paying membership.

Then how much you actually get is totally up in the air. If mine's the only piece Reader A applauds that month, I get 100% of the revenue (minus Medium's cut, of course - the house always wins); if Reader B has applauded 1,000 pieces this month, I get 0.1 percent of the revenue (as do the other 999 authors.)

It's a model which is inherently insular: of the traffic that has visited the piece so far, 90% is external (and thus earns me nothing other than name-recognition) and 10% is internal to Medium. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of that 10% has applauded, and I won't know what that translates to in terms of Cash Monies until Medium calculates it and tells me. I'd be much better off promoting it to existing Medium members - such as by joining a 'publication' on Medium - and ignoring external traffic sources, but I don't want to do that.

As a ballpark, though, the answer - long in coming - is "not much, but considerably more than I'd get on Brave." The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarking piece I wrote on Medium has earned about $277 lifetime; if this earns the same, I'll have done very well indeed.

Thankfully, I'm not relying on the Medium income: I've pieces in various websites and magazines based on the same core data, which pay one heck of a lot better!

[rglullis]

Thanks for your answer. In all honesty and taking what you said in consideration, I still believe that the Medium model should die in a fire, I won't feel bad for not supporting you through it and I hope you consider other alternatives.

[ghalfacree]

I'm not sure you read what I wrote, but I have considered other alternatives: it's called "writing for magazines." If you'd like to support me without supporting Medium, you'll likely find me inside more than one bound collection of thinly-sliced dead tree at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or bookseller.

I've even considered Brave. Hell, I've even tried Brave. According to my email archive, I signed up as a publisher in January 2018. Sadly, it's just not a sustainable model yet - which is why my piece is monetised by Medium, not Brave.

[rglullis]

I wouldn't be keen on supporting dead tree magazines and its excessive ad-to-information ratio, newspapers that only are tangentially focused on providing good content and more focused on creating constant crisis as well or any kind of publishing industry with so many middleman that need to be eliminated.

Sorry, it is really not my intention to pile on you. I am just really tired of the current state of affairs in regards to the publishing/authoring economy. I know it is easier said than done, but we need to have more content creators that are willing to take a principled stand and stay away from these actors and start creating exclusively on terms that are more ethical.

[ghalfacree]

If you're using Brave, I'm assuming you're using the browser's main claim to fame: the ad-blocking/ad-switching functionality, yes?

So, you won't support content creators who publish on a website which uses advertising.

You won't support content creators who publish on a website which allows non-members and free-tier members access to a limited number of articles a month and charges a fee, distributed to the content creators, for unlimited access.

You won't support content creators who publish in print, in magazines or newspapers.

I'm sensing a theme, here: you won't support content creators.

I would love to host my own website (actually, I host several) and write the same kind of content I do now, but how exactly am I going to feed the bills and pay my children? This is literally my job - I'm not just dashing out a quick blog post as I Segway to the London office of my cryptocurrency startup for a day of find-and-replace in the whitepaper. If I'm not getting paid for my words I'm not getting paid at all.

Brave is not the answer, I'm sorry to say. Something like Brave may be - I used to play around with Flattr, which was the same kind of micropayments model as Medium but applicable to any third-party web content, and doesn't have the ethical issue of blocking everybody's adverts but its own - but Brave ain't it, at least as it stands.

You don't want to support content creators, you want to support Brave. That's fine, but don't frame it as wanting to support content creators but only in one very specific and questionably-ethical way.

Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is: pop me a payment across, in the currency or cryptocurrency of your choosing, and I'll publish the same piece on my main website. No adverts, unless you count the cover shots of the books I've published (hey, there's another way you could support me - and if you're worried about ethics, some of them are available for free download under a Creative Commons licence!) down the side.