A long or a short post? What is the average length of a post on Hive? How many words in a post are enough? Does longer posts mean better quality? Are longer post rewarded more on Hive?
Let’s take a look a the data for post length and payouts based on this.
Maybe you can draw some conclusion what the length of your posts should be.
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 from start of August 2021 till August 2022.
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 been in the range of 3k to 5 post per day, with some spikes here and there. The highest number of post was back in November 2021, when the price of HIVE was the highest reaching more than 2$.
In the last months this number is around 3.5k per day.
Total Number Of Characters In Posts
Here is a chart for the daily number of characters from posts.
The blockchain has a data of body length, or number of characters per post. When we sum those up, on a daily level we get the above. This chart follows the post chart trend. More then 10M characters are printed every day on the blockchain from posts only.
The number of characters by itself doesn’t tell us much.
Number Of Words Per Post
Here is the chart.
An average of 630 characters per posts
What seems interesting from the chart above is that the number of words per post has increased a bit in the period, going from around 600 words per post to 700 words in the last months. The post have gotten longer 😊.
As mentioned above, the blockchain only has data for number of characters per post, not a word count. I have converted the numbers of characters in words based on an average of 5 characters per word. Its not a 100% exact number but close enough.
Note that videos are usually short on characters, that doesn’t represent their length.
Posts Length And Payouts
If we categorize the number of posts according to their word count, we get this chart. This is a data for the last 30 days.
We can see here that most of the post are shorter and belong in the 500 words or less category. As the post length increases, the number of post is getting smaller. But interesting that the last category, more than 2500 words has just a bit more post than the previous one 2k to 2.5k words in a post.
What about the payouts?
Are longer post getting rewarder more than short posts?
Here is the chart for payouts according to posts word count in the last 30 days.
The longest post, 2500 plus words, have the biggest payouts with average of 18$ earned per post.
On the second place are the 2k to 2.5k words posts with almost 15$ per post. The 1.5k to 2k word count post have a similar payout around 14$. The short posts, under 500 words have the smallest average payouts with $3 per post.
The table looks like this.
| Words per post | Number of Posts | Average earning [$] |
|---|---|---|
| < 500 | 61,129 | 2.86 |
| 500-1000 | 26,441 | 8.24 |
| 1000-1500 | 11,513 | 12.14 |
| 1500-2000 | 6,484 | 14.15 |
| 2000-2500 | 3,173 | 15.18 |
| 2500 + | 4,173 | 17.81 |
The posts under 500 words on average earn 2.86$ and the posts with 2500+ words earn on average 17.8$.
Longer post obviously earn more.
But as we can see the post from 1.5k words and above are all in quite a close range of earnings. So maybe it is questionable are the 1k more words on top of that 1.5k or even 1k words post worth it.
Who Is Making The Longest Posts?
Here is the chart for authors who are making the longer posts in the last 30 days.
The @hiq account is on the top here. It is a magazine style account creating a very long post with 12k words in them on average. It doesn’t create a lot of those post though. Small number of post, but long ones.
@jacekw is on the second spot. He creates a long reports with a lot of data for Splinterlands cards. @curangel on the third place, with the compilation of posts that is curating.
Fun fact: This post has 850 words including the title.
All the best
@dalz