This was inevitable.
People will not pay bloggers enough, and Medium needs a cut of that 'not enough'. The answer is ads, and that will enable someone to be better than Medium.
Pando thinks they should buy Patreon and be done with it. (48h link)
I don't disagree. I give Scott Lowther $10 a month to find me weird shit like... a scan of the Apollo-Soyuz poster included in cartons of Tang in 1978.