I'll be curious to see where you land at the end of the month! August will be one year of me writing on Medium and I have learned tons, "met" some great people and obviously have started my own publication. It's hard to compute some of the big writers from the early days because Medium was a different space then (so I've heard). I have found that getting stories further distributed by Medium helps my stats a bit, but not alot.

What I have realized is that Medium LOVES articles on writing, especially if it's writing on Medium, which is where some of those high ranking writers ended up doing.

The other thing I've learned about getting higher stats is engagement with other writers and what I call "feeding the machine," which means you gotta' publish regularly.