I've been a member for just about 1 year (started in Sept 2017). You have to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee and then you get paid for people reading your articles and sharing what you wrote. You also pay for advertising and have to buy books from the website bookstore. Up until May of 2018, I was making money each month, just about $80-100 more than the cost of using the site. But payments have not come through since then, and there are rumors the CEO resigned without any comments recently, as of 9/3/18. The supposed goal of the site was to help authors find readers, but I don't think I ever connected with anyone that wasn't an author.