I am glad you are making some money, Gosia. But, you are probably the exception. I won’t ever lock my stories. I don’t believe in paywalls. I would much rather be able to easily add a donation link to my pieces. Even that is hard with Medium… mostly because I can’t set up a custom footer for all my pieces.

Knowing the readers I have the number of viewers, readers, and responders would probably drop to nothing if I did lock my pieces. I would rather have people read the pieces than pay for them.