Let’s be honest. You’re probably reading this for free right now, and that’s the problem. “Free” trained us to scroll past everything that matters. The attention economy has taught you that, outside of streaming services, nothing is worth paying for.

The Case for Paying Attention (and Paying for It)

Which means nothing is worth making well, which means we’re all drowning in an ocean of content nobody remembers ten minutes after consuming it.

I’ve been writing here, on Medium since 2015. A decade of watching this platform stumble through identity crises like a drunk person looking for their keys. Different logos. Different designs. That weird period where they tried to be a journalism powerhouse and nearly bankrupted themselves. The subscriber count jumped from 400,000 in 2019 to over 700,000 by 2021, but you’d never know it from the way people talk about this place.

There’s no authority here. No prestige. Just writers and the people who read them. Which is exactly why you should be here.

Two Million Dollars a Month

Medium pays writers more than $2 million monthly. That number should matter to you even if you never plan to write a word. Because when you pay $5 a month for a membership, portions of that money go directly to every writer whose work you applaud, highlight, or spend time reading. Not to shareholders, not to advertisers. Not to venture capitalists. To the person who woke up at 5 AM to finish an essay about grief or tax law or competitive Scrabble strategy.

The alternative? You could subscribe to individual Patreon accounts at $5–10 each. You could pay for separate Substack newsletters. It adds up fast, and quickly becomes unsustainable for most.

Or. you could do what most people do and pay nothing, consume everything, and wonder why everything is AI slop optimized for engagement.

The platform has 100 million monthly visitors and the average person spends 2 minutes and 16 seconds here. Not hours. Not days. Minutes. Because Medium isn’t sticky. It doesn’t gamify your attention or algorithmically trap you in an infinite scroll. You come here, you read something, you leave. Revolutionary concept: a website that lets you leave.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to tell you that over 50% of Medium readers make more than $100,000 annually. That the largest demographic is 25–34 year-olds at 33%. That this is an educated, affluent audience hungry for substantive ideas.

I don’t care about demographics, though. What matters is that when you pay for Medium, you’re not buying content. You’re funding the commons. You’re saying that writing—real writing, the kind that takes weeks to research and days to revise—deserves to exist without having to shove affiliate links down your throat or beg you to smash that like button.

The Hellsite Still Beating

Let me tell you about Tumblr, which everyone has declared dead a dozen times since 2007. It has 135 million monthly active users. 620 million blogs. 12.8 million posts published daily, that’s 2,000 posts per second. Which means while you’ve been reading this sentence, someone on Tumblr has posted their thesis on why Goncharov (1973) is the greatest Martin Scorsese film that doesn’t exist.

Gen Z makes up 50% of active users and 60% of new sign-ups. The generation everyone swears lives exclusively on TikTok is actually migrating to a blogging platform from 2007. When Brazil banned X, Tumblr traffic surged 350%. When TikTok’s future looked uncertain, Tumblr-tagged posts jumped 395%.

People are fleeing. Not to new platforms. To old ones.

I post my poetry on my Tumblr and the engagement is genuine. From people who chose to follow an account that posts poems about grief and religion and grocery stores.

Users spend an average of 20 minutes and 46 seconds per session. They view 6.39 pages per visit. This isn’t typical doomscrolling, though. This is actually reading things, reblogging them, adding thoughtful tags that function as commentary. This is the internet before we ruined it by trying to monetize every second of human attention.

27% of US Tumblr users earn over $100K annually. Another 25% earn $80K-$100K. This isn’t broke college kids (though, they’re here too). These are people who could afford every subscription service and instead choose to spend time in a place that doesn’t demand anything from them except creativity and weirdness.

Build Your Own

Neocities hosts over 1.3 million sites. It hit the 1 million milestone in February 2025, up from 55,000 sites in 2015. The indie web is not dying. It’s being rebuilt by people who are sick of having five customization options and calling that “personalization.”

You know what we lost? Everything. We lost the ability to make our MySpace profiles look like a unicorn vomited glitter onto a black background. We lost auto-playing music and tiled backgrounds and cursor trails. We lost webrings and guestbooks and hit counters. We were told this was progress, that clean minimalist design was better, that users wanted consistency.

They lied.

The platform is 95% associated with indie web culture and 90% opposed to AI content. 85% of users are focused on community building and web design. These are people, many of them young, many Queer, many artists, who are choosing to learn code not because they want to work in tech but because they want to own their corner of the internet.

When you build a site on Neocities, you own it. The HTML, the CSS, the design, the content. No platform can change the algorithm and disappear your work. No company can decide your content violates community guidelines. No one can sell your data to advertisers or train AI on your words without permission.

Free users get 1GB of storage and 200GB of bandwidth. That’s enough to host a substantial personal site. Learn HTML. Learn CSS. Rawdog it—no AI assistance, no templates, just you and the documentation and the satisfaction of making something that’s entirely yours.

Where, Not What

You already know you spend too much time on your phone. You don’t need statistics to tell you that. You need someone to tell you that the problem isn’t the time—it’s where you’re spending it.

84% of 18–24 year-olds in Germany feel they use their phones “too much.” Meanwhile, users spend 20 minutes and 46 seconds on Tumblr per session and nobody’s calling that an addiction. The issue is intentionality, not duration.

Scrolling TikTok for two hours? Addiction. Reading a 10,000-word essay on Medium about the Philosophy of time management? Focus. Coding your personal website on Neocities? Productive hobby. The line isn’t screen time.

I’ve watched the digital detox app market projected to reach $19.44 billion by 2032, up from $0.39 billion in 2023. Apps to help you use your phone less, which you access on your phone, which send you notifications to remind you not to use your phone. The ouroboros of late capitalism eating its own tail.

It’s so much easier to replace the bad with the good. It’s harm reduction, at the very least.

You don’t need to delete Instagram. You need to follow 50 poets on Tumblr and watch your dashboard fill with actual art instead of sponsored content. You don’t need to quit Twitter. You need to spend an hour building your Neocities page and feel the satisfaction of making something permanent. You don’t need to stop reading online. You need to pay $5 for Medium and discover that longform writing still exists, still matters, is still being made by people who give a shit.

The Authority Problem

I know Medium doesn’t have the best reputation. Reading something here doesn’t carry the weight of reading it in The Atlantic or The New Yorker. There’s no vetting process, no editorial board, no gatekeepers deciding who gets to speak.

And that’s exactly why it works.

The tragedy of the commons isn’t actually that everyone gets to contribute. The tragedy is we’ve been taught to believe only certain voices deserve platforms. The false idea that writing only matters if it’s blessed by institutions, or that ideas need credentials to be worth considering.

I have a 3.8 GPA English Honours degree. I’ve published several poetry chapbooks. I’ve been writing for half my life. And none of that matters as much as whether you’re still reading this sentence.

Medium has stumbled through so many different identities—the expensive in-house publications, the venture capital silicon valley mindset, the near insolvency, the constant redesigns. But what’s emerged is something sustainable. They’re paying writers over $2 million monthly. 100 million people visit monthly. The deliberate slowness of the UX is resistance to the attention economy’s demand for infinite engagement.

The platform is what we make it. Not what venture capitalists want it to be. Not what advertisers demand. What we—writers and readers—choose to create and support.

What Do You Get With a Membership?

Let’s be specific about what $5 a month buys you. Access to 100 million registered users’ work. Every paywalled article. Every Boosted story curated by human editors. Essays on Philosophy, programming, poetry, politics, parenting. Tutorials on cooking, coding, climbing out of debt. Memoirs about culture, gender, growing up in places that don’t appear on maps.

You get to read my 3,000-word article about AI’s existential crisis. You get to discover writers you’ve never heard of who will change how you think about everything from municipal politics to the history of punctuation.

And when you highlight a sentence or applaud a piece, the writer gets paid. Not much—maybe a few dollars, maybe a few cents. But it’s direct. No middleman taking 30%. No advertiser deciding which content is “brand safe.” Just you, signaling that someone’s work mattered enough to warrant your attention.

Here’s what I’m asking you to do in 2026:

1. Join Medium as a paying member. Not for me—I’ll be fine either way. For the ecosystem. For the idea that writing should be compensated. For the radical notion that $5 a month is less than you spend on a single overpriced coffee and might actually change how the internet works.
2. Join Tumblr. Post weird shit. Reblog other people’s weird shit. Build a dashboard that reflects your actual interests instead of what an algorithm thinks will keep you engaged longest.
3. Learn HTML and CSS. Make a Neocities page. Make it ugly. Make it beautiful. Make it yours. Spend a Saturday afternoon figuring out how to embed a music player or create a navigation menu. Feel the satisfaction of understanding how the internet actually works beneath the glossy apps that have been designed to keep you from looking too closely. Replace the bad with the good. Spend less time on TikTok and Instagram because you’re busy reading something that will matter tomorrow. Redefine what “social” means by participating in communities built around creation instead of consumption.

I’m not loyal to any platform. I’m loyal to the idea that the internet can still be good, can still be weird, can still be human. That we don’t have to accept AI-generated slop and the slow degradation of everything that made this place worth visiting.

The Internet can be saved. But only if you’re willing to pay attention. And pay for it.

This essay was written by a human, published on Medium, and will earn a portion of your $5 membership if you’re reading this behind the paywall. That’s how it should work. Join us.