No, you are not being nosy, this is a great question.

The short answer is: Medium changed its payment methodology on October 28, 2019. Under the old payment system, based on claps, did not earn very much money despite the views.

The new payment system, based on member reading time, essentially proved a theory of mine which is that Medium is reaching a critical mass where if enough people are paying medium subscribers, and your content indexes well in a broad search, some percentage of those “random external” people will actually be Medium members.

So under the new payment system, this article went from earning nothing, essentially, to a steady earner (not a huge earner, but for the past three months it has been among my top 10 stories by earnings).