You could be in the medium partner program and write and get paid . The only requirement was that you had to have at least 100 followers ( when I joined you would get paid right away). Now that is gone and the requirement is that everyone pays those 5 dollars if they also want to write and get paid. I opened another account to test one thing : I wrote a story I published . Then I came to this account and searched for that profile and the story but it showed that that user had nothing published (well because I didn’t pay the subscription to médium there). So, they are definitely earning more. Hey so far this month I have earn not even 100 euros. Lol