How you earn money through the Medium Partner Program is that they distribute each member's $5 monthly fee to the authors that the member has read, based on reading time. So if I read only your articles your month, you'd get my entire $5, even though it's only 1 view per article. Of course, there's some rounding because Medium keeps an unknown profit margin (I'd guess around 20%, but I'm speculating).

The tricks to being successful on Medium are 1) Getting curated, especially in popular categories like Relationships and Productivity; 2) Publishing super frequently, like 3+ times a day; and 3) Writing good headlines -- either ones that will get a lot of clicks (preferable) or a lot of search traffic (not as good).

Writing about writing, and especially writing about Medium, means you have a tiny audience, compared to the number of people here for e.g. "Life Lessons" or "Mental Health."