Substack is great, but hard to get people to become paid subs. The best paying is NewsBreak, just write opinion articles, put opinion before the title. Otherwise, submitting to paying up front online publications is the way to go really, something I'm going to start doing, like Reader's Digest, etc. These open to all writing platforms don't work for the vast majority of writers.
Thanks for the article, I'm nearly to the point of dropping the $5 month membership here, that is about the only way I'll make money here... I can still write here for exposure, just save $5/ month, cause all the writers I like are gone and Medium is worse than ever pay wise, I make more now with Google adsense on my blogger blogs, which doesn't say much, about. 20 cents a month.