There are two more positive connotations that are, IMO, more on the nose.

1. COGS is a completely standard accounting term. Although I was hired from the community, I also have other qualifications and one of them is fluency in basic business accounting. The upside for everyone is that this fluency has played a big role in stabilizing Medium financially so that people can count on us staying around for a long time.

2. COGS is exactly the place on the accounting sheet that authors should want to be. It literally says that we believe that in order to grow we need to pay authors more. If we believed we could grow without paying authors more we'd put it somewhere else.