Who Gets to Be a Paid Writer?

How do you get the attention you need? Medium tried top-notch writing, but that failed. Now, like Substack, Patreon, and others, rather than get in the ring itself, the publishing platform has opted to take a back seat, delegating the process of content production to people with pre-baked audiences and quietly taking their cut.

On Substack, writers can directly email their audience. Medium is still figuring out their business models; they initially tried ads but now use a subscription model

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more