This is very debatable. I’d say there are two good reasons for it:

1. It looks better on your profile. See Benjamin P. Hardy’s profile. Here’s a screenshot:

2. I find that Text -> Image -> Text right at the beginning breaks the reading flow. Seeing the headline with the first few paragraphs makes the connection easier. That’s my opinion at least.

I’ve seen some improvement on both my view count and read ratio doing that.

To be honest, the reason I had started doing that back then was mostly because the other big writers were doing that. But I stand by my reasons 1 and 2 above.

Happen to be proven wrong!