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Comment by mgiannopoulos | Hacker News Reader

"Medium pays authors by dividing up every individual subscriber’s fee between the different articles they’ve read that month."

So if you read one article during a month , your entire fee would go to one source even if you are subscribed to many sources ? Not sure how to feel about this.

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That sorta makes sense. If you were the one article that brought a user online that month, and the user is a full paying user, perhaps you earned it.

Really though I think you should give articles a weight that's got a six month half-life or so. Users who read articles 6 months ago are still paying out to those authors, but not as much as they are paying out to the recent articles.

Why? It's the consumer's fault s/he over paid for one article. Author got lucky. Good for them.

If I want to support a source without remembering to read every article or clap a thousand times , I can't under this model.

Plus, is this going to be transparent to the readers? Will I know how my 5$ were split among sources?

Well if your trying to support a source and don't read any of their content are they really benefiting engagement to the platform like Medium wants?

Maybe they can add a Patreon system as well.

Once you pay Medium, it's Medium's money. Sending fine-grained monetary support to content creators is exactly what Patreon is for.

Were you serious about your bet?

The fact that you are tracking down my other comments to make remarks completely unrelated to the thread isn't exactly convincing me I was wrong.

You even incentivize readers to read more. What's not to love?

But it's in the writer's best interest that I only read 1 article, theirs. Also, it's probably best for Medium that I read fewer articles- at least then some writers earn a reasonable amount of money and stick around instead of everybody earning a pittance.

That's a valid model if there are very few readers. The number of paying visitors is probably monotonically increasing with the amount of content. Maybe medium has created a model about the critical mass of paying readers to sustain the ecosystem.

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