Apparently its some arithmetic calculation of pay for your page views rather than impressions. They are a bit coy about it in their FAQs but they have different payment options once you qualify for monetization. I think I'm going to write about this whole journey and see what I find out. There is some guy whose only schtick is the weather report and he makes like 17k a month. Soooooo...they also have it set to where you can choose your news to be pertinent to a specific location or the US in general. Mine are all set to the US because Kentucky is such a small population relative to other major areas. I think my next experiment leg will be writing some pertinent local content and seeing how it fares. Or I'll start reporting something obscure about the weather like barometric pressure for migraine sufferers. But yeah I am super tempted to keep putting out national articles to trigger folks and reporting it back here. That's my first death suggestion so I feel like I'm doing pretty good.