Free publishing tools and publications are the foundations of Medium. They are really important to the platform. Do you know the importance of publications? The curation part can be done using the publications. Publication editors work closely with Medium staff and they can recommend good stories! In addition to that, in my opinion, publications and Lists share some common features. We can use Lists to categorize our articles. Like that, some publications have many stories around a specific topic. For example, the Towards Data Science publication has all the stories related to data science. Readers can find them in one place! Publications help new writers to grow quickly. In addition to that, some publications bring a significant number of views to the platform. For example, Towards Data Science publication bring 10% (about 15M) of total monthly views on Medium!