I wrote a script to gather the top-earning blog posts over the last 30 days.
Here are the results:
You can try it yourself with HiveSQL:
select top(100) author, title,permlink,category,total_payout_value,created from comments where total_payout_value > 100 and created > (GETDATE()-30) order by total_payout_value desc;
Is there anything we can learn?
First, the category isn't very meaningful. You have to take the category and add it to https://peakd.com/c/ to find out which community it references, eg.
- hive-139531 = HiveDevs
- hive-109288 = ThoughtfulDailyPost
There doesn't seem to be any single category or community that earns big rewards more than any other, however.
It does seem that Ragnarok and Splinterlands earn well, but that is likely due to the excitement and size of the audience around these games.
A couple of the top-earners were around the Typhoon topic, so trending news and getting the lion's share of the spotlight on those will be a good reason why those appear.
Big apps such as Leo, Peakd, 3Speak, do well. The latter probably has a lot to do with the airdrop (though that has gone quiet), perhaps with the others, it is a combination of interest from the happy user base and also loyalty from the same?
Looking at the more recent articles, even less of a trend appears.
The good news is it seems your results, in a financial sense, have much more to do with who you attract to your content than what you write about.
Somewhat unintuitively, visibility and quantity of votes mainly matter in that your chances of a higher vote value go up, not that a lot of votes equals a high total.
As you can see above, @acidyo achieved 995 net votes but earned less than the top @nonameslefthouse and @mango-juice with 548 and 560.
There is no single winning formula for writing a big earning blog post.
Obviously, a hot topic will definitely help - both for getting views and also for expanding your reach. The more people see and vote on your article, the better chance of getting in front of a whale with a fat vote.
How to Get High Rewards
The conclusion I draw from this, and I would love for you to give your own thoughts in the comments, is to network rather than try and write super impactful articles.
Hundreds of regular votes are far outweighed by getting noticed by a single whale.
Not being a whale myself I can't authoritatively speak to the psychology of those folks, but I wonder if a ton of votes might actually discourage someone from dropping a fat vote also? Do whales try to time things so they get a better chance of a curation reward?