I think there's a big dose of luck. My best performing articles were published in Illumination. I think if your story finds an audience early on, those reads will encourage the algorithm to highlight it to more of their followers, so that's when it's worth having access to a big following. But if your story doesn't find an audience early on, it can die very quickly. Some of my worst performing articles are in that publication as well as my best performing ones. I generally find Medium centric articles do well on there. Other people have had weight loss and spirituality articles go viral on there. It can work well. But my suspicion is that these stories would have done well whatever happened because enough of my followers engaged to get the algorithm to promote it. Then it gets picked up by people interested in those subjects, regardless of the publication. I think tags may be more important than publications these days. I respect Illumination these days because they're supportive, they publish quickly, and they communicate well. They turn everything to US English unless asked not to, but if I leave a note requesting it, they'll leave my British English alone. They work hard and do a good job. However, I don't think stories get much visibility on the home page. It moves too fast. That's where smaller publications come into their own.