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.
It's not a terrible idea. An interesting dapp was released in alpha for Ethereum today, called status.im. It's a messaging network that allows ETH transactions, and there are no servers. Things are going to be very different in time. Eventually there will be a Medium blog network without the Medium company, and the ability to pay/subscribe to writers will be native. This internet may fade away because value transfer is not a property of the protocol.