I regularly read some great articles on Medium, as a publishing platform the quality is quite decent. But the problem Medium has is content relevancy. I go to the homepage and Medium recommends me articles I have no interest in at all. The NYT are doing quite well from a subscriptions perspective, so people don't have issues with paywalls mostly if the content is good and there is value. But, Medium has prematurely announced a subscription when they have nothing they can really offer.
Medium needs to fix their algorithms so I stop seeing irrelevant Donald Trump opinion pieces that I, as an Australian have no interest in reading. As far as paying for online content goes, Medium is probably the only platform I'd justify paying for written content. I want to see Medium and Ev succeed.