Should everyone be able to read Medium member stories?

Question for the medium members reading this: Why are you a member?

Do you do it for the premium articles? Do you want more than your three free articles a month?

Or are you a member because you believe in the Medium mission to transcend the ad-based revenue model?

I was thinking about this when reading Poynter’s article about Jay Rosen’s Membership Puzzle Project, which researches the different types of membership models. Rosen drew a distinction between subscriptions and memberships.

“Subscription is — you pay your money and you get a product and it’s a product relationship,” he said. “And membership is — you join the cause because you believe in the work.”

Rosen shared a finding about a Dutch news source that resonated with me.

“One of biggest discoveries is that members don’t want a gate around the journalism they’re supporting,” Rosen said. “Part of the reason that members of The Correspondent in the Netherlands support it is that they want others in Dutch society to have this journalism available to them, even those who are not members.”

“But we find that in strong membership sites, the availability of the journalism to the public at large is part of why people are members,” he continued.

In the U.S., Gimlet media has a similar model. You can join as a member (and get some perks like a t-shirt), while the podcasts remain available to all, paying and non-paying members. NPR has had this model for a long time.

When you have ideas you want to share, you want everyone to hear them. Medium isn’t Netflix. I’m not paying for just content. I’m paying for the mission.

That’s the dilemma I face when I put articles behind a member paywall. I want people to read them but I also want to get paid.

What do you think? Is this a freeloader problem? Should Medium stories be free and open to all? Or do you like it how it is now?