I wonder where the $500 bonuses came from then? No one reported a decrease in its earnings (except the overall decrease from the gold rush days to the pandemic days; which I also don't get because Medium was flourisihing plus the Writing Summer with $500,000?! There's more);Medium is only sharing x amount of the subscription revenue with us. There is one payment pot for sure... but I think its much bigger than we think and we could get paid more.

Ads... I don't think so. Ad-free is one of Medium's unique selling propositions and it's not the way to go.