Oh no! I finally got to apply for monetization today, I am trying to temper my expectations though. I think I underestimated how well some of my "no one will read this" ideas landed, pre monetization it's frustrating. The only thing I will say is, while I have had a couple of Newsbreak friendly local pieces do really well, bizarrely the thing that put me over the edge this week was a recycled Medium piece that not only had no reads here, but was flagged as not having a good title for distribution by Newsbreak. It is currently trouncing all of my other stuff. So maybe try publishing things there that you don't think will perform? It is disturbing if they are not distributing fairly post monetization though. Writing platforms, ugh.