Medium has grabbed hundreds of millions of VC money and still isn’t profitable, they tried and abandoned a few different structures for the site (resulting in bringing in numerous publications who later fled the platform), and CEO/founder Ev Williams has largely stepped away from the site, having finally gotten a VC hit with a large minority stake in Beyond Meat.
I second the recommendation to use Wordpress.com, the Wordpress-hosted version of the blogging software, which starts at free (with limitations and ads), doesn’t offer the unlimited plugins for self-hosted Wordpress, but handles hosting and security (which can be a horrendous management issue when using said plugins). It’s fairly easy to use, you can pre-schedule posts, and it’s rock solid. I discussed using it here:
and here:
discussing how I’d created a Twitter-like microblog in one case using the free P2 theme