This is a very true statement. A few weeks back I wrote a story that had 2.6K+ reads from outside of Medium and a total of 3.3K reads in all. I imagine that 2.6 were read by people who hadn’t reached their three member stories per month limit. As of right now the story has earned $6.80.
Even if I were to promote my own stories outside of Medium they would have limited readership and compensation.
I also agree with Gail. I think Medium is on a big learning curve right now but at the same time a lot of what I presented in this article are things I would think, or hope, they were aware of from the beginning.