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As a casual writer, I would present that argument that Medium has made it very easy for amateur/casual writers to get paid. My experience was essentially: sign up, write, submit to a publication such as Better Programming, wait for the article to be accepted, edited, then published. Once the article was published I got paid for reader engagement.

Compared to when I had my own blog with blogger, which required signing up to AdSense, making sure the blog was being crawled by Google, then dealing with spam comments once the blog got some traffic, the Medium experience is a vast improvement.

As a casual writer, I would say that Medium makes it very easy for you to get paid for writing. The downside is that Medium owns the audience and you are making their platform better - but I would argue that not everyone wants to spend the time needed to build their own brand and following.