See, I thought this was a side effect of alignment (because they always start and end pay periods…

See, I thought this was a side effect of alignment (because they always start and end pay periods on wednesdays, even though they calculate earnings daily now). But the March 21st thing doesn't fit, then.

They probably are not explicitly using a random number generator to pick which stories get pennies. More likely, they are rounding up under certain circumstances.

The way I imagine this goes:

1) you make 0.2 cents on some story in February

2) you make 0.2 cents on the same story in March

3) meanwhile you have made 0.1 cents on something else

4) the algorithm says "hey we owe this guy 0.5 cents, let's give him a penny and file it somewhere" so they file it under the story that made 0.4 unpaid cents total, even though the last view was last month