Nonsense. The four contest winners wouldn’t have made anything on Medium with those essays. The contest used totally different criteria. They were all too long, with bad titles and so-so images. There’s no lesson to be learned from them about succeeding on Medium.

Most of the people who routinely do well on Medium didn’t do well in the contest. The contest was skewed toward inexperienced Medium writers because it was a subscription drive. If the winners keep writing long essays with dense formatting, dull titles, and so-so images, that prize money is as much as they’ll ever make on the platform.

Even though the contest rules said to follow Medium guidelines, none of the contest winners did. Their entries were too long, and some had no subtitles or put the title under the image. The grand prize winner included an image without attribution which should have been a straight up disqualification. When this was pointed out, Medium quietly replaced the image with one that didn’t infringe on copyright.