I'm struggling to finish my keynote. Can you just write it for me? You've nailed a lot of it.

Who are we talking about here really? If we take out the pure scammers and the ones who are now doing better?

Would you call this the Medium middle class? Is that what they would call themselves?

First of all, I vehemently believe that anyone in this middle class could be in the upper class (whatever that is). If you can write every day on Medium then you could pick a topic, research it, write a book proposal and get a book deal. Then with that book deal you could get consulting, high level jobs and speaking gigs.

And so that always puts me in a state of confusion. Why are people so excited to stay in the tier where they grind out $50/month?

I was just talking to a tech writer about that. And it's like DUDE! people are paying $500k salaries to people who are expert in the topic you write about. Go get that bag! Instead he's commenting about double digit monthly earnings.

Ok, fine, I have to admit to myself that I'm wired in a way that's not always healthy and I grew up in a similar system that was always oriented to maximize achievement. And I'm healthy and all sorts of other privileges (no kids, great spouse, good savings).

So maybe the middle class medium writer is the middle class because it's fun and the people in it have other things they care about. Or they don't have time to be more than that.

But that still leaves another problem which is that this middle class is unsustainable. It's got serious, fatal pressure on all sides.

One is that it's below the bar that subscribers want to pay for. That's enough. Bottom line, the bar for being subscription worthy is really, really high. (And authors need to understand that the bar includes however many subscribers as they need to make a living. It’s not enough to have a handful of super fans if you expect to make $5k/month)

It's also attacked by AI at the bottom end. You can't make a living summarizing things that someone else can now summarize for free.

It's also attacked by the doer who writes occasionally. That writing has got the benefit of coming from someone who's actually out their living and so has current, wise, deep, real things to say. Nobody lives an interesting enough life to write something great every day. Doers often make more money in reputation than Medium will ever pay them. So they can put in more effort because their payback is bigger.

And then, last and specific to Medium, we have hobbyists who don't care about making money. Well over half of writers here aren't in the partner program. A lot of this writing is the exact same quality level as the middle class. Why would we pay money to take page views away from these hobbyist writers?

As a company, we made the decision as stewards of subscriber money. But as a former author, I see it more like the above.