As a non-paying member (or anonymous visitor) you get to read 2 "member-only" articles per month. For "member-only" articles, you get a remuneration proportion

As a non-paying member (or anonymous visitor) you get to read 2 "member-only" articles per month. For "member-only" articles, you get a remuneration proportional to the "member reading time". For members who subscribed via your "onboarding" page (I don't have one I think, I don't know, I should look into it), you get a remuneration proportional to their reading time on any articles, not just yours. The friend-tag on an article's link removes the paywall, allowing you to increase views when sharing the article. The more views your article has, the more Medium will promote it. But many platforms removes it as it may have trackers associated to it (I haven't looked into that to confirm or infirm). EDIT: Fun fact, the Javascript subreddit even forbids medium links because they consider the content to be spammy 99% of the time. For Medium, they want to incite people to buy a subscription, hence the paywall. But they also want writers to generate the content for them, hence the friend-link and remuneration model. The remuneration is quite small, so I don't think they are loosing money. But short clickbaity articles about how console.log works can generate a LOT of views, and writers spamming those can earn up to 300$/month (or maybe more), hence the bad reputation of Medium. I'm not interested in doing that, I mainly write to share about my work and just enjoy the small remuneration as a reward for my open-source work: it's not entirely useless if I can get a meal per month out of it ^^ EDIT: Out of transparency, by writing an average of 1-2 articles/month on topics I enjoy, I managed to make an average of 10-15$/month. The ones about Rust are the more profitable ones, go figure :P