Better late than never. Thanks for your informative response. A couple of questions:

1. Is your point that if I joined Friends of Medium and paid the $150/year subscription fee my earnings would return to what they were. For example, my December 15 article, an 8 minute read, has 1700 views, 1400 reads and earned $49.35 so far. 1400 reads x avg reading time of 3 minutes = 4200 minutes/70 hours. 70 hours x avg earnings of about $1.60/hour read = about $112 under the old system where reading time counted. Paying an extra $100/year to earn as I used to is certainly worth it if that would actually occur.

2. My RTV (read to view) ratio is currently varies from 65 to 87%. So the hit to earnings doesn't come from that. So what explains the 50-80% drop in earnings under the new system?

3. I understood that Friends of Medium generated 4x the previous earnings of writers they read, not that FoM enhanced their own earnings, bringing them closer to the old earnings model. How was I wrong?

The $255 I earned in July vs $90 in November was a nice to have, not a necessity. As a retired prof of behavioral finance, I view the money as a symbolic representation of success and respect vs failure and contempt (by Medium). Since I view the psychology of the money as more important than the financials of it, I don't want to pay the extra $100 only to be snookered again. So my question to you is this: if I invest the extra $100 to be a Friend of Medium, what's the probability of earning as I did before?

Thanks and best from sunny Porto.