Word Counts, Picture Counts, Rewards, and more Week Ending 7 July 2025

The first week of July is now over, and I've refined the process of analysing the posts on HIVE, with some new metrics, and a bit of a new scorecard.

The below research is conducted using my brain, post history, PowerQuery, some light DAX, and a sense of interest in reward outcomes, based on the bits that make up a post's structure - words, pictures, and how they compare to similar posts.

I am also keen to hear from all of you what you think of this data, and how it can be further improved in the future.

For the first week of July, there were $32,266.35 worth of rewards distributed to posts. The average payout was $2.03, and the max was $85.60. The median was $0.63.

The highest word count was 12,168, the average was 413, and the median was 271. The overall trend of shorter posts being the more dominant on the platform continued, with only 37% of posts being longer than average.

6.5 million words were published in total on HIVE for the period, and here is the distribution of that, by word count:

Pay per word was down around half a cent per word, since the last set of data was imported, and the majority of the payouts went to posts under 750 words.

What about the typical post on HIVE? What does that look like? Well, thankfully, here's some stats:

There isn't much difference between the median and average post, other than the fact that there's significantly more words in the average, and a few more pictures.

How does total, aggregated payout look, compared to the word count? A little bit like the distribution of the posts, it seems, with a steep falloff for longer posts.

How about when we consider a few more variables, and look at the reward factor? That is to say, the highest payout in a word count group divided by the average? Are these posts 40x (overall) more valuable than the average post on HIVE?

Only 15.58% of all posts published on Hive were above average word count and above average pay out. 9.55% were below average word count, and above average payout. So, around 25% of posts took the lion's share of awards, - and I really do mean the Lion's share.

There is too high of a reward factor on posts in the category of "below average word count and above average pay out". Again, that's max payout divided by average, presented as a number.

What about when we look at authors on an individual basis, for the period? (Or at least the top 20 for each category?

The authors I tend to be interested in are those who post more words, because I enjoy that sort of content. People who get above average payouts, and have an above average word count, are very obviously putting the effort in - users like @galenkp, @tarazkp, @erikah are unsurprising to see in this list. They all also heavily engage with their commentors and stoke the good fires of conversation.

I'm not going to comment on the users with a below average word count and above average payout, because I do not immediately recognise any of the names on the list as it is not content that I currently read. Perhaps (for the content in English) - I might have a look and try to understand why these posts are rewarded for fewer words.

What about those potentially "emerging" authors, with Below Average payouts?

There are no names in the top 20 on either of these lists that I recognise across the great swathes of content published on HIVE. These are likely some authors to watch for, particularly those with longer word counts. If you're in a mood for taking a deeper look, please, be my guest, and flex some manual curation if you feel these authors deserve some more reward.

Finally, I have put together a view of the key metrics I'm looking into for this data set into a slice by community, sorted by total payouts.

Are there any other metrics you'd like to see?

So far I have

• Posts / Authors
• Total Payouts
• Pay Per Word
• Avg, Max, Median Word Count
• Images Found
• Avg Words Per Picture
• Average Images
• Pay Per Image
• Total Net Votes
• Pay Per Vote

What other elements would be useful to compare each communities posts against posts within that same community? Please let me know - and I will build some new features for future iterations of these posts.

Finally, something I've been talking about for a long time.

Who the fuck swears the most in their posts on HIVE? (Not comments, just posts!)

The only words, as an Aussie, that I consider swearing are "shit", "fuck", "cunt" (or variations thereof, so this captures "fucker", "fuckhead", "motherfucker", "shithead", etc

I think to no one's grand surprise, @galenkp continues to be the custodian of Hive's swear jar. Do try to be nicer to them, outside world. :)

Thanks for taking a look at the data. I'm keen to get more ideas from you all on how this can be improved for future iterations, or whatever other metrics I might be able to extract.