I’m not sure where you live, but that $50 is peanuts to anyone living in the first world. It is, however, a lot of money to someone living in the third world. I had to think about it when I lived in South Africa. In Europe (as in the States), it is meaningless.
If one is a good writer on Medium, one doesn’t have to worry about paying $50 per year. One makes it in a few days on Medium. No writer who is any good writes more than they read. Reading extensively is part and parcel of being a good a writer.
I’m not sure where you get your figures, but I don’t think they’re accurate. Medium has lost a lot of readers. According to various articles on the web (the verge), Medium had 700,000 paying members in 2021. That’s a $35 million income for the year. That’s not a lot when one considers payment of staff, premises, running laptops, software, etc. I think, at the end of last year, if I remember correctly, Williams said he had paid writers $1 million in total during the year.
In 2018, investors had paid in $132 million, and according to some sources, Williams is now paying out of his own pocket to keep the publication running. Investors need to be paid back first before anyone else. I have provided links below. In my opinion, Medium can fold anytime. Therefore, I am grateful for what I can get, and I’m busy building a readership elsewhere.
A lot of people made quite a bit of money in the past on Medium That’s not because they were brilliant writers. They weren’t. They just got lucky, and because they got lucky, they think they are brilliant writers. Now they can’t figure out why their figures have dropped.
I was one of those writers who earned the $500 bonuses every month it was paid. In May, I also topped $3800 for my articles that month. That came about because one of my articles was picked up by the international media and it sent a lot new readers to the platform. I had 800 new readers add me during a week.
That said, as a professional writer who has been published on three continents during the past 60 years, and with 22 years of experience earning a living as a writer on the web, I still don’t think that any writer on this platform has the right to make any demands about what they are paid. We don’t pay for the platform, so we don’t bear the costs. I can assure you that if you ran your own website, it would cost you more than $50 per year. And you would have no readers. Getting traffic is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
With regard to why I was given the warnings, I called some people stupid and disagreed with some holy cows.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ev-williams-raising-more-money-for-medium-2018-11
