“Medium” just doesn't work

Well, it's clear why this author isn't getting paid for his medium posts: he's writing low-effort low-quality material desperately in need of editing.

Medium doesn't present itself as a substitute for a full-time job. It presents itself as a mechanism by which people can get paid a non-zero amount of money for the kind of material they would be writing for free anyway, based on metrics related to actual quality (such as read time & explicit recommendation) rather than purely based on views (as with advertising).

I use medium and run sites that have ads. I make about twenty dollars a month on medium, and nearly all of that comes from material I wrote years ago; in comparison, I have been using adsense since 2006 and have made a total of nine dollars from it (across several blogs, a once-popular discussion forum, and a youtube channel with a couple monetized videos in the millions of views). Keep in mind that google won't cut you a check or do direct deposit until your balance hits $100; at the current rate, I will get my first Google Adsense payout early in the twenty-second century.

If your content is so bad that Medium is giving you nothing, you won't get anything from ads either.