Congrats on your success, Anangsha. This article is a valuable reality check for aspiring Medium writers. My experience has also been that a non-boosted article earns practically nothing.

I cannot decipher the algorithm Medium uses for generating revenue. I can have articles with similar statistics and yet 2X difference in payment.

Another important point is that the half-life of an article is very short. My articles usually draw good viewership for about 3 days, and then drop dramatically to a tiny trickle of ongoing viewers and revenue. You really have to feed the machine!