The theory makes sense. In practice, I read a lot of articles every day and have no idea why one of my reads paid out over 30 cents to the writer. To my mind, it's extremely unlikely that the total cost of payouts is limited to my membership fee. So, unless you are looking at the actual payouts, it's hard to draw any conclusions. My article looked at the actual payouts, and I certainly saw the effect of diminishing returns for the writer once I became a regular reader! So the principle is correct.