It’s not a direct mathematical correlation — it’s more an indicator (that might not be the word I’m looking for) that you have much better chances of getting some of those people who don’t clap a lot and are paid members.

With external traffic, there’s a pretty high probability that you’re dealing with people who fall into 1 of 2 categories.

1. Those who have an account but aren’t paid members
2. Those who clap a lot (think traffic that comes from FB groups or other social media) and their claps are heavily diluted.

I was looking at why I was having much higher numbers and not much of an increase in earnings and the pattern held across the board. Those articles with high levels of internal traffic and by high I mean 70%+ did Way better than those under that percentage.

Now the type of external traffic may matter. I didn’t dive that far. For example, most of my external traffic on posts with high claps/high fans come from FB groups. Those fans are worth very little.

But it could be that fans from email may be more paid members who don’t clap a lot and those posts do well. Don’t know — didn’t look that closely yet.