How are Hivers doing with the length of their posts? Is posts length increased or decreased? What is the average length of a post on Hive? How many words in a post are enough? Are longer post rewarded more on Hive?
Let’s take a look at the data for post length and payouts based on this.
Here we will be looking at the number of characters and words per post, what is the average and how does the daily numbers fluctuate. Then we will be taking a look at the payouts for the posts according to their length and categorize them.
The period that is analyzed here is 2020-2024.
Total Number of Posts
First an overall look at the number of posts per day in the period. These are post only, comments not included. Here is the chart.
The number of posts per day has increased towards 2022, reaching 5k at ATH, and then dropped in 2022 to around 3k post per day where it has been almost stable for more than a year now.
Total Number of Characters in Posts
Here is a chart for the daily number of characters from posts.
The blockchain has a data of body length, or number of characters per post. When we sum those up, on a daily level we get the above. This chart follows the post chart trend. The numbers of characters per day is between 10M to 12M per day.
The number of characters by itself doesn’t tell us much.
Number of Words per Post
Here is the chart.
From here we can notice that the number of words per posts has been steadily increasing in the period. It has started to around 500 words per posts on average in 2020, and grew towards 800 words per posts in 2023. In 2024 we have seen a small drop and somewhat stabilization around the 800 words per posts.
It’s quite amazing to see that the average length of posts has been growing trough the years.
As mentioned above, the blockchain only has data for number of characters per post, not a word count. I have converted the numbers of characters in words based on an average of 5 characters per word. Its not a 100% exact number but close enough.
Note that videos are usually short on characters, that doesn’t represent their length.
Posts Length and Payouts
If we categorize the number of posts according to their word count, we get this chart. This is data for May 2024.
We can see here that most of the post are shorter and belong in the 500 words or less, category. As the post length increases, the number of posts is getting smaller. But interesting that the last category, more than 2500 words has just a bit more post than the previous one 2k to 2.5k words in a post.
What About the Payouts?
Are longer posts getting rewarder more than short posts?
Here is the chart for payouts according to posts word count in the last 30 days.
We can se quite a even position when it comes to payouts for the top three categories. Posts above 1500 words are on average getting $10 or slightly more. Then comes the posts between 1k to 1.5k words with just below $10.
The short posts, under 500 words have the smallest average payouts with $2 per post.
The table looks like this.
| Words per Post | Number of Posts | Average Earning [$] |
|---|---|---|
| < 500 | 37,439 | 2.34 |
| 500-1000 | 22,806 | 5.87 |
| 1000-1500 | 10,256 | 8.79 |
| 2500 + | 2,739 | 9.89 |
| 1500-2000 | 5,105 | 10.13 |
| 2000-2500 | 2,463 | 10.83 |
The posts under 500 words on average earn $2 and the posts with 1500+ words earn on average $10.
Longer post obviously earn more.
But as we can see the post from 1k to 1.5k words are very close in the earning to the longer posts and they are the most efficient in terms of earnings per word.
Who is Making the Longest Posts?
Here is the chart for authors who are making the longer posts from the start of 2024.
The @swc-curation account is on the top here with a post with 12k words. It’s a reporting account that is dual lingual so it puts in a lot of characters.
@curangel is on the second spot with a 11k words per post. They make a compilation post from the curated post.
@jacekw, an account that posts long for posts with data on Splinterlands.
All the best
@dalz