I’m in my first month and I love the ecosystem and the idea of it. But I’m pretty discouraged with the monetization and traffic aspects.

I’ve seen little evidence of internal traffic. And when I fire up my social channels and send traffic, there’s no reward. So far my articles are between 92-97% external traffic. IDK what the average is, but it’s gotta be similar for most writers—that external traffic is beating internal.

Medium has no method to monetize this traffic. This is confounding to me. The answer seems clear—they should offer an unpaid version with ads and use this revenue to pay writers. Paid users still see no ads. Like… I can’t fathom while this hasn’t happened yet.

Also, people running publications are completely uncompensated? I have several ideas for publications but… why would I do that? I can see why there are so many abandoned publications when I search on topics.

I’m hopeful Medium has a plan to address these issues because I really do enjoy it here.