Elizabeth -- one more thing to note:

When you click on the Member Partner Earnings and the first screen appears with all the titles of your stories, underneath each is a plus sign with "See more" --if you click on that and expand it you will see your lifetime earnings for that article...so it would be good for you to use that metric to understand how much that first article you wrote as earned for the entire year.

Then when you click on the details of the story to get the full overview of it -- below on the left is where the "lifetime member read time" is located to get a full-view of the performance of your article.

cheers!