I don't think there's much doubt that Timely was back in the pack as far as rankings of publishers in the Golden Age is concerned. The two leaders would have been DC and Dell, no contest. I'd guess that on the average, Fawcett, Quality, and possibly MLJ's circulation in any given month might have been larger than Timely's. Sure, Captain America was briefly a blockbuster hit, and continued to sell respectably after the initial sales spike leveled out, but the same can be said of Crime Does Not Pay a few years later, and I don't hear anyone claiming that Lev Gleason was ever the #2 publisher. Timely was an also-ran.
Who am us, anyway?
--The Firesign Theater