Thanks for commenting, Lesley. Now I have a couple of boosted stories to look at, the figures seem to make no sense. You can have two days with almost exactly the same user reads and read ratios, with one being assigned 4 or 5 times the earnings. Which suggests that the 'follower' factor is hugely influential (or they just make it up...).

As you say, it's something we do out the love of writing and sharing our stories. But as soon as you see figures suggesting that 'actually, this could be a worthwhile secondary source of income' from one story, one week, then obviously you want to be able to think about how to maintain or improve that.

But the weird, secret numbers game makes it impossible.