$0.0052

Yes, that's right, over the week under examination, half a cent per word was paid out on hive. When I was a professional writer, paid on a per word basis to write editorials, reviews and other content, my pay rate was typically 0.12AUD a word.

That was over fifteen years ago, and articles typically took an hour to go from concept to completion - sometimes with longer ideation periods, and for longer, more in depth articles, research took a manner of days.

The written media landscape has changed dramatically from those early days of the Internet however, and Hive, is of course, not those early days of the Internet. We are, Afterall, "web 3.0"

That pay per word is far from a guarantee. Just because I can type ninety or more words per minute, it is not absolutely no guarantee that I will "make" 0.45 just by typing for a minute.

That is because the reward pool is a dynamic, shifting thing. It depends on how many people vote, how they vote, and if there are downvotes. Its a complex thing, and nothing is yours until after the seven day period since it was originally posted has elapsed.

Nothing on Hive is a promise.

Above Average and Below Average Posts

Distribution by Word Count

In this section, I want to see the distribution of posts that are above and below the average word count and median word count.

In order to do this, I have created groups for the word counts. I did this with a simple conditional column in PowerQuery, with different increments of word count as the number of words increase in a given post.

Once groups are put together, this is what I get as a distribution (sorted by number of posts):

As expected, the overwhelming majority, are between the median and the average. If we plot this on a chart, we might get a more meaningful curve of post length.

Most posts are above 100 words. Very few posts are above 2000 words. The most likely length of a post is between 101 and 499 words. What do you know, averages and medians work as they should!

If you prefer to see this distribution as a pie chart, because pie is delicious, here it is:

Now, how many posts (count and percent) are above / below average length?

And again, how does that look as a pie chart?

Distribution by Payout, and Word Count

Now is where we're going to get to some of the potentially deeper insights, and to answer an age old question, which I am sure we each have our own hypotheses on. Are longer posts better? By better, I am asking - do they get more of the rewards?

Data holds no lies, only in the way in which it is presented, so I am going to be as neutral as possible in presenting the data.

There's also some important points to consider about word count. I'm not excluding things like headers, code, and for non "English" posts, spaces do not appear as commonly - so posts written using Korean, Japanese, or Chinese characters are likely to have lower word counts, as they seem to contain less spaces overall.

Having said that, the bulk of posts on HIVE tend to be written in English or Spanish, and counting the spaces between words for these languages is a pretty reliable indicator of word count.

Anyway, data:

As a markdown table:

I've highlighted average payouts so it is easier to compare against the median and highest payout for the given period for digestibility.

Longer posts tend to be rewarded more handsomely, but the pay per word drops as you add more words. The majority of payouts are in the categories above 250 words and less than 2000 words. Anything longer than 2000 words, people don't seem to have the patience for.

Also, importantly:

Again, I want to see this data on a continuum to see how payouts correlate with post length, similar to the distribution of word count featured earlier in this post.

I am sure you don't want to see this by total payout only, so how about looking at it by average, and comparing it to the median for each category?

Add in the max reward for each category, and its an uglier chart:

It suggests that the "max" payments (ie, the most rewarded posts) have something new that I am going to introduce for the purpose of the discussion, which is "Reward Factor" this is the Max Rewarded post in a word category bucket, divided by the average reward in that category.

Therefore, we can, at least in terms of reward, consider "how many times better" that highest rewarded post was in that category than the average post. In my years of experience on HIVE, Post reward is not a direct indicator of quality, but a lot of people flock to it as such.

Reward Factor

On Average, the "Reward Factor" for the highest rewarded post is 25.07 across all the word count categories. Is that a fair distribution of the reward pool for the "average" authors?

Does a meritocracy award its best contributors 25 times more "stuff" than the average in other distributed systems or economies?

I suppose also, a better question is, are we rewarding the "best" content?

Bringing it all together

I now want to take a look at the sample of the most rewarded users in each category.

Above Average Word Count, and Above Average Payout, sorted by Total Payout Top 30:

Above Average Word Count, and Below Average Payout, sorted by Total Payout Top 30:

Below Average Word Count, and Above Average Payout, sorted by Total Payout Top 30: