Another approach would also get to the subject of a certain amount of dismay I’ve seen expressed about Medium: writing for free is not a sustainable business model for writers who are trying to make a career of it. This approach (that I’m about to propose) would also be a model for the publishing industry in general, which seems to be flailing about trying to figure out how to stay afloat in a world where people expect to read everything for free (because they mostly can.)

My proposed system would have Medium establish a “tip jar” system. Readers could (at their option) deposit whatever amount of real money they wanted from a credit card, bitcoin, whatever, and if something they read moved them sufficiently to do so, they could enter a tip amount at the bottom, which would be debited from their account and go directly to the writer’s. The writer could use the amount to tip other writers or, if enough accumulated to make it worth doing, s-he could withdraw it as a credit to whatever real money source had been linked.

As it might be applied to the publishing world at large, this system would have all publishers working with a third-party money handler common to them all. Instead of the current system where a website offers you x-amount of monthly stories for free, and after that you have to pay for a monthly or annual subscription (as with New York Times, for example), all stories would have free synopses posted, and if you wanted to read the full story on any one of them you would simply click a box that would debit whatever amount (maybe 5¢? or 10¢?) from your master account and send you to the full story. I don’t know about others, but I know my own reading covers so many sources that I couldn’t possibly get my money’s worth out of a subscription to any one of them, but I’d be happy to pay a small amount for an individual story that seemed worthwhile.

I’ve actually proposed this idea to The Guardian, but they ignored it. I guess it’s hard for traditional publishers to let go of the appealing idea of locking in reader loyalty through subscriptions. Someday maybe they’ll wake up that people have become promiscuous readers. Or maybe they’ll die in denial.