I’ve been on Medium.com for just a few weeks. It’s too soon to say whether it will be a significant source of income, though I’ve already gotten one payment. Here are a few observations, based on limited data.

• Hot-button topics seem to do better. Two of my three most popular articles had the provocative titles of “Why Does Socialism Still Appeal to Anyone?” and “Free Speech Is Under Attack.”
• Articles on political topics are largely skewed to the extreme left. That hasn’t stopped me from finding readers, though.
• It’s annoying that you can’t log in directly. I have to log in to Google first. Since I don’t like being logged into Google for any longer than I have to, I use a private browser window. It’s inconvenient.
• There are a lot of ghost profiles around. I’ve searched for people I know to follow and found dozens, but most of the accounts show little activity. One is literally a ghost profile, belonging to a friend who died over a year ago. It looks as if Medium never deletes profiles for inactivity or non-renewal.
• “Claps” translate into income, but you can’t conclude anything from the number of claps you get. People can give a post anywhere from one to 50 claps. The money they pay Medium is divided up to the authors they clap for. Someone who gives out lots of claps pays out less per clap than someone who claps just a little.
• There’s no obvious pattern in which articles are selected by curators. I think that if you post more than two articles in a week, your chances start to go down. If you get selected, you get a big traffic boost, at least if you’re a new writer like me.
• People writing about Medium on the Net tend to assume that a user’s entire $5/month payment goes to the writers they clap for. I find this unlikely. Medium pays for itself somehow. I don’t know how much goes to Medium and how much to authors.

Onward and upward! If you’re on Medium, new followers of my account are always welcome.