Exactly. I run Better Programming, which is the second biggest programming publication on Medium after Towards Data Science. And it's definitely the case that a

Exactly. I run Better Programming, which is the second biggest programming publication on Medium after Towards Data Science. And it's definitely the case that authors are opting in to the deal that Medium offers: a usually small amount of money and a fairly large boost in readers. The average article we publish does 10k views, which for most authors is way more than they'd get self-hosting and posting out to Twitter/FB. I think also that Medium is still overly dominated by user generated content, i.e. what people here are calling low quality articles. You'd think of that content differently if it were better curated and better edited. But all of Medium's subscriber revenue gets reinvested in their content. Most of that is author payments, but also they pay copy editors and curation editors. What they haven't done in programming yet is pay for any articles that have had a proper high quality edit. In programming that's a story editor, tech reviewers and a bug/errata updating process. But I suspect that will change because the subscription numbers are starting to be big enough that they can afford to invest in these things.