Hive Posts Length | What is the average? | Is there a correlation between post length and payouts?
Ever wonder how long your post should be? Do longer post on Hive get better rewards?
Here we will be looking at data for posts length and payouts.
There are a lot of things that are up for debate on Hive. Posts quality for example. What is it? How to determine is a post a good one or not? Do quality posts get rewarded enough etc.
Here we will be looking at the number of characters per post, what is the average and how does daily numbers fluctuate. Then we will be taking a look at the payouts for the posts according to their body length.
The period that is analyzed here is August 28 till September 27, 2020.
Total number of characters from posts
Here is a chart for the daily number of characters from posts.
On average there is 9.2 million characters in posts per day. Characters from comments are not included above.
Note that a character can be a number, a symbol etc, not just letters. Tables can generate a lot of characters. Links, images as well.
The number of characters by itself doesn’t tell us much.
Let’s take a look at the average characters per posts.
Here is the chart.
An average if 2770 characters per posts!
How many words is this? Well this can warry, as sometimes its 5 characters per word, other times 7 etc. In our case I’m going with 5 characters per word. This means that the average post is around 550 words.
550 words on average per post.
This is an estimate as already mentioned, because of all the other symbols that make a character. But on average its probably close enough.
550 words per post is somewhere between short to medium post. Meaning after all hivers are not getting to long in their post, but still keeping it at some decent level.
Note that videos are usually short on characters, that doesn’t represent their length.
Posts length VS Payouts
Is there a correlation between the posts length and the payouts?
I have tested a few charts for this. Lets see.
Fist the scatter chart.
Looking at the chart above one can conclude that the shortest posts are earning more. Most of the dots are bellow the 500 words limit.
But this is not an accurate representation. What the chart above is telling us is that basically there is more short post than long posts, and the individual earnings of each of them.
What we need is the weigh of these individual dots.
Next the histogram chart.
This chart is also inclining to the short post as well. Also not a real answer do longer posts earn more.
Categorize post per length
If we just categorize the posts and extract the average earnings, we get this.
| Words per post | Number of Posts | Average earning [$] |
|---|---|---|
| < 500 | 66,367 | 1.71 |
| 500-1000 | 23,543 | 3.61 |
| 1000-1500 | 8,134 | 5.26 |
| 1500-2000 | 3,331 | 5.66 |
| 2000-2500 | 1,740 | 5.98 |
| 2500 + | 2,158 | 6.71 |
We can see a clear correlation here. Longer posts do earn more. Out of the 105k posts in the period 66k are under 500 words, or 63% of all posts. The second group 500 to 1000 words, has a 22% share. This two groups account to 85%.
The posts under 500 words on average earn 1.71$ and the posts with 2500+ words earn 6.71$.
From the above we can clearly notice a trend. The number of longer posts, are much less than the shorter ones, but on average they do earn more.
So, there you have it. Want to earn a bit more on Hive. Make longer posts. Or post 3 to 4 times a day with 500 words each 😊.
Who is making the longest posts?
Here is the chart for authors who are making the longer posts.
Some popular name in the top, and some not as much 😊. A compilations posts tend to be longer so there is a few of those in the top.
All the best
@dalz
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I like these graphs, but when it comes to the users of this platform, somewhat different from the other reports :))
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What do you mean?
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Very interesting - this is a question that I’ve seen continually over the years.
I may do some self-experimentation and do some very long posts. Im somewhat good at that ;)
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Lol. English Teachers call that “rambling”.
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A lot of the content posted on Hive is narrative. If you want a more fashionable and pro-term for that, you could look at "confessional journalism". Which in British English happens to represent a large share of current opinion and column writing.
But you can, indeed, also call it "rambling" in order to highlight an elitist touch.
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I love your answer and I love having an elitist touch when it comes to my opinions about writing.
I also love reading narratives, ulogs are my favorite content on the hive network. Someone sharing in long form about grocery shopping is enjoyable to me.
For leofinance I prefer short, concise posts.
Sadly enough English is only my fourth language and one whose grammar never interested me. Subtitled English movies and early MTV are the basis of my English. Sadly enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As such I also tend to fall among the "ramblers". As a reader tho, I'm definitely an elitist and that also shows in a vast amount of +2k words articles I read every day.
But newsworthy content should often, indeed, not be more than the (for Google recommended) 550 words. And with short paragraphs, please.
Hive has somehow re-energized the early era (ca. 2005-2007) style of personal blogging and that shows. Not everyone is a native speaker and not everyone is a writer either. Many are even not (great) story tellers. But it's beautiful that earnings have been further democratize, beyond the "wannabe problogging" scene which quickly killed personal blogging once it started picking up pace around 2007 and even the smallest paid link opportunity started slowly disappearing for most "freetimers".
!ENGAGE 20
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ENGAGEtokens.1160 words per post :) Including the videos
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As a High School English teacher, I can attest that most of the “long” posts could be edited down to half the length.
Longer equals not better.
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Yep true ... agree
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I fully agree with those statements!
I don't like it when people ramble or write unclearly for any other reason. I start suspecting they're hiding flaws in their thinking. In reality, it is just sloppiness in most cases. The sort of people whose thoughts go off on a tangent very easily are prone to rambling. There is no way to fix it except pause, read what has been written multiple times and only post when all the loose ends have been tied.
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A lot of times they try to make it seem like it is some "philosophical" thing that can't be grasped. Yet, there are ways to shorten even those abstracts. !ENGAGE 50
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Yup.
ENGAGEtokens.The internet, by which I mean the Big driver of traffic AKA Google, favors length tho.
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That's true, which is why lengthy signatures might not be a bad idea - within reason, of course.
The creativity of Hivers is amazing. Recurring long footers will lower the content quality rating in Google's index.
You don't see them on high ranking content, do you?
I guess, not.
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https://twitter.com/Dalz19631657/status/1313213188331188227
LOL so note to self, post long-form content, I think long form content would be more valuable on a site like LEO since the longevity and ranking ablilty is higher so people will read it and it brings in more income as well as improving time on site.
At some point I will most likely dig into LEO only numbers for posts length and rewards :)
I also hope we will see a mechanics for rewarding content longer than 7 days. Then longer posts will make even more sense. Of course short form has a place as well. Twitter is a prime example of this :)
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This is interesting to see and pretty much as expected in many ways.
From my own experience as someone who tends to write a bit, I feel that those who write between 500 to 1000 words or so, tend to give more of themselves through what they present, which tends to then build stronger relationships over time, which of course will correlate to steadier votes. There is also the perception of value that a longer post might bring in, affecting voting behavior - personally, I prefer to actually add value to reader's lives in some way - which I also think requires depth, not bullet point lists.
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:) Yep
With a 550 average Hive seems to found its place in the semi long posts category. The curation window of 7 days have a role in this. If we have a method to reward "evergreen" posts longer I believe we will se more from that side.
In general I think Hive needs far more apps for posting than now, and a bigger diversity of them. Some for short form posting, others for long form. It doesn't need to be all about long form, but we just need to categorize and sort them better.
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Evergreen content will need to be able to find support from SMTs, as it is the kind of content that keeps people coming back for years on end. It is very important, people don't seem to understand how it compounds on platforms though.
Yep to the more frontends - but it is a chicken and egg problem, we need more demand from consumers, which will also drive more creators - then the demand will be there fore more fronts as well as the support to populate them.
There's a correlation for sure, and a pretty strong diminishing return the longer you write!
I agree with the comments highlighting the 500-1000 word strategy, I think Hive/ LEO lend themselves quite nicely to that classic blog/ short essay type of writing.
You've nothing to gain from putting your depth articles on here, because you're not going to get rewarded appropriately.
I save all my longer articles for revisesociology.com where I personally get 100% of the SEO benefit from them in the long term. That's crucial to my resource sales.
This is the whole reason I chose NOT to move my 'professional work' to Hive, it just doesn't make sense.
Having said that I like the way some LEO curators are looking to reward people for SEO content, that could do with being formalised a bit more, otherwise everyone else is getting a free-ride on your long-form content by benefitting from more eyes on EVERYONE's work, not just your own!
Another major reason I wouldn't put long form content on here is because there's no easy way for people to navigate around my work - on your own blog you've got pages/ drop down menus, it's so much easier to link it all together coherently!
This place is great for more eclectic and personal lifestyle posts I'm finding!
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Its interesting to see your point of view as someone who is running his web page as well.
Totally agree with the long form. Its just doesn't make sense at the moment. I'm also thinking to cut down some of my longer reports as the tend to take a lot of effort to create them :) At least for now. Some middle sized reports are more appropriate.
Having a long form content that earns for years its something that can be really amazing around here.
That's why I already mentioned Hive needs more posting apps diversity, more options, short form, long form etc, so everyone can find their place.
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I think @howo's latest post about the DEV team meeting pointed to maybe a move towards s being able to set up recurring payments for content, like Patreon which would be a move in the right direction, maybe?
I think longer form content posts about Hive work quite well TBH!
But you probably are underewarded on Hive, not so much so on LEO at least!
I'm doing OK on Hive as well. Not complaining :)
Leo is great!
Yes I can't complain either.
Although I'm also aware that I'm the new mini-Exyle.
He's the person I used to look at most and think 'why is this idiot getting 40 Steem for posting a picture of himself grinning with the steak he just cooked?
Now that's me:
Why's that idiot earning 10 Hive for posting about his running updates?
I'm so glad the AVs are disappearing - there's a few high profilers around here I'll very much enjoy seeing earning less. Even if it means I'll take a hit myself.
And LEO getting rid of that front running curation reward, BEST thing to happen on Hive since its curation I think. Well, maybe after WLEO!
This is a useful read, thank you.
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Hey thanks!
Also welcome to LEO and Hive :)
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Excellent statistics my friend, they are very useful indicators !
There's often the misconception that long form content is better quality but a lot of them turn out to be rambling or maybe posts with two or more languages.
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Interesting analysis @dalz!
I remember someone running an analysis on readership vs. article length on writing site HubPages many years back and the conclusion from analyzing 100,000's of posts was that there were actually TWO "sweet spots" in terms of article length vs. page views/time spent. One was 500-750 words which is your typical "news story" or quick update... and the other was 2,000+ words, which gets into the territory of thorough research article.
What you found here with rewards as the metric does seem to somewhat bear that out.
Long isn't always better, though. Long is only meaningful if there's truly some "meat" there to be read.
=^..^=
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Long with meat has 2k as recommendation because it’s ideal for so-called “cornerstone content” in Google.
550 Words has been the minimum recommendation for “bloggish” updates for years already. That’s a number which has incrementally grown from 250 ca. 2007-2009 to 550 around 2013. Dropping below that number does make a negative impact for sites with a decent editorial strategy and some years of DA already.
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Thanks!
The majority of posts (85%) are in the range above... 500-1000. So Hive seems to be following the typical "news story" in most cases.
Now parse for video embeds and lookup video lengths :)
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Happy to .... any recomendations how to that :)
I dunno. You're the post stats wizard :)
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Lol.... I dunno as well ... but I bet there is a way
Very interesting analysis and correlation, longer posts seem indeed to earn more.
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Seriously? Why are we using characters as a metric? If we are considering the actual quality of a book, let's say, then why on earth are we using characters? Authors don't use those ... and if we are budding authors up here (and honestly, quality is so subjective that this portion of the post doesn't tell us much), so it seems like we could be using better things to compare. I have to say, too. I don't agree with the length of a post to measure quality. Quality is about the subject matter at hand, and it can better be judged by someone with a vested interest in a particular subject. Hence why I am found in some areas, but less in others. I go where my interests are. It also helps that I'm not trying to get rich up here; was just looking mostly for social interactions and another community to use as a possible sounding board. If you want rewards for your writing worth anything, then, go participate in a writing competition.
Hey, dont judge me, I'm just a messenger :)