ghalfacree

The problem with Patreon - and thus Quilette, which is 95 percent funded by Patreon - is that there's a massive gulf you can't cross. Popular Content Creator who has a hojillion Patreon backers and gets $10,000 a month from 'em has no worries; person who plays about with it in their spare time and gets $5 a month can buy a beer. Job's a good 'un.

But what about the person who wants to write full time, but hasn't built the audience yet? How do they go from $5 a month to paying the bills? In my case, I didn't have to: by the time I switched careers I had enough regular clients to cover all my outgoings, albeit only just. Quit the day job, picked up some more clients, and here I am doing it full-time to this day.

If I were relying wholly on Patreon - or Brave, or Flattr, or even Medium - I couldn't have done that. Patreon isn't going to give me $300 on spec to write an article that might not do well; Medium won't front me a few grand against royalties so I can take time to write a book.

D'you know who will? The traditional publishers.

I appreciate you have a personal stance on this, but so do I - and mine comes not from the perspective of "I'd like to read this but it's on a website I don't like" but from the perspective of "if I don't get paid for this I'm literally homeless."

Actually, I have a Patreon account - https://www.patreon.com/ghalfacree - I signed up just before the new fee scheme came in to lock in the old rates, but never launched it (hence the zero backers.) Don't really have time to give it the love it would need to gain traction, either - again, we're back to the problem of not having the cash to go from zero Patrons to I-can-feed-my-children Patrons.

If you're using Brave, I'm assuming you're using the browser's main claim to fame: the ad-blocking/ad-switching functionality, yes?

So, you won't support content creators who publish on a website which uses advertising.

You won't support content creators who publish on a website which allows non-members and free-tier members access to a limited number of articles a month and charges a fee, distributed to the content creators, for unlimited access.

You won't support content creators who publish in print, in magazines or newspapers.

I'm sensing a theme, here: you won't support content creators.

I would love to host my own website (actually, I host several) and write the same kind of content I do now, but how exactly am I going to feed the bills and pay my children? This is literally my job - I'm not just dashing out a quick blog post as I Segway to the London office of my cryptocurrency startup for a day of find-and-replace in the whitepaper. If I'm not getting paid for my words I'm not getting paid at all.

Brave is not the answer, I'm sorry to say. Something like Brave may be - I used to play around with Flattr, which was the same kind of micropayments model as Medium but applicable to any third-party web content, and doesn't have the ethical issue of blocking everybody's adverts but its own - but Brave ain't it, at least as it stands.

You don't want to support content creators, you want to support Brave. That's fine, but don't frame it as wanting to support content creators but only in one very specific and questionably-ethical way.

Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is: pop me a payment across, in the currency or cryptocurrency of your choosing, and I'll publish the same piece on my main website. No adverts, unless you count the cover shots of the books I've published (hey, there's another way you could support me - and if you're worried about ethics, some of them are available for free download under a Creative Commons licence!) down the side.

I'm not sure you read what I wrote, but I have considered other alternatives: it's called "writing for magazines." If you'd like to support me without supporting Medium, you'll likely find me inside more than one bound collection of thinly-sliced dead tree at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or bookseller.

I've even considered Brave. Hell, I've even tried Brave. According to my email archive, I signed up as a publisher in January 2018. Sadly, it's just not a sustainable model yet - which is why my piece is monetised by Medium, not Brave.

Massively depends on performance. You get money from a subset of a subset of a subset: there's the set of the audience; there's the subset of the audience that are logged in to Medium at the time; there's the subset of the logged-in subset of the audience that bother to click the 'Applaud' button; there's the subset of the bother-to-click-Applaud subset of the logged-in subset of the audience who actually have a paying membership.

Then how much you actually get is totally up in the air. If mine's the only piece Reader A applauds that month, I get 100% of the revenue (minus Medium's cut, of course - the house always wins); if Reader B has applauded 1,000 pieces this month, I get 0.1 percent of the revenue (as do the other 999 authors.)

It's a model which is inherently insular: of the traffic that has visited the piece so far, 90% is external (and thus earns me nothing other than name-recognition) and 10% is internal to Medium. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of that 10% has applauded, and I won't know what that translates to in terms of Cash Monies until Medium calculates it and tells me. I'd be much better off promoting it to existing Medium members - such as by joining a 'publication' on Medium - and ignoring external traffic sources, but I don't want to do that.

As a ballpark, though, the answer - long in coming - is "not much, but considerably more than I'd get on Brave." The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarking piece I wrote on Medium has earned about $277 lifetime; if this earns the same, I'll have done very well indeed.

Thankfully, I'm not relying on the Medium income: I've pieces in various websites and magazines based on the same core data, which pay one heck of a lot better!

Hi, author of the piece here! You're right that WordPress wouldn't have given you a popup before you could read, for free, the article I spent a couple of months working on. It also wouldn't have provided me with any income to support creating the article in the first place.

Medium, on the other hand, does. I mean, it's not much - I get a slice of the revenue from paying subscribers', based on how much they 'applaud' my piece - but it's higher than zero. Despite this, Medium also makes it available to read free of charge for non-members - up to, I believe, a somewhat miserly three articles a month, though you can bypass this if you really must by using a private browsing window to get another three, and another three, and another three, and another three...

I've got kids to feed and bills to pay. If you really don't want to click an X on the login prompt and read it all for free, I can give you my payment details and sell you a PDF copy...

There's a fundraising drive trying to get together the money so Bletchley Park, the museum dedicated to the work of Turing and the other codebreakers at Station X during the war, can buy the offprints and keep them for public display. More info: http://www.justgiving.com/turing-papers/