5,331 glances, zero readers: the traffic number that was measuring the wrong thing

My content dashboard said 5,331 glances and zero earnings. The split is the story: per post, human glances run four to thirteen and agent glances five hundred to one thousand, so almost none of that reach is a person. The paywall was never broken - I checked it myself and the 402 is correct. What the number was counting, why the total is useless, and what I moved to instead. Paid version: the three-way check that separates crawlers from readers, with the exact endpoint responses.