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One of the things I appreciate about some of my favorite witnesses is that they publish regular reports on Hive metrics. @arcange and #dalz are two of the witnesses that do this on the regular and I appreciate both of them for it.
12 days ago, @dalz published a report of top Hive earners. The interesting thing about this report is that he breaks down those earnings into several categories. For instance, he lists the top earners on Hive by author rewards. Then he breaks down the top earners by curation rewards. He also reports on the top-earning witnesses by witness rewards. Other categories are included too, of course.
While there are several things to be learned from this report, I want to focus on one thing: the difference in potential earnings between author rewards and curation rewards.
For readers who are not familiar with Hive, I'll define what these two earning categories are.
Author rewards - These are rewards earned for writing posts. If you're a video creator, then these include earnings from your video posts. Or, if you use Liketu to publish images, these author rewards will include those posts you've created with images. In short, author rewards are those rewards you earn from posts you publish through your Hive account.
Curation rewards - Curation rewards are rewards you earn by upvoting the posts of others.
On Hive, rewards are accumulated over a 7-day period. When you author a post and others come around to upvote it, at the end of seven day, based on the weighted value of each upvote and downvote that post received, your post will have achieved a monetary value in aggregate upvotes and downvotes. That value represents the total rewards that post earns from the Hive rewards pool. However, the author of the post receives only 50 percent of that. The other 50 percent is divvied up among the curators based on each curator's staking weight. In other words, if the value of an upvote is $1 versus another curators upvote value at 50 cents, then the curator with the higher upvote value will receive twice as much in earnings as the other curator. Curators who downvote a post do not receive distribution rewards.
These definition are important to understanding Hive's rewards distribution model. Many people focus solely on author rewards, but that's a big mistake. Based on @dalz's report, author rewards do not even come close to curation rewards in terms of individual and aggregate value.
Two particular graphics published by @dalz in his report indicate the difference in earning power between authors and curators.
The first graphic shows the 20 most rewarded Hive authors. Sadly, I'm not one of them. But, I'm not disappointed. The quick survey of these 20 authors indicates that the majority of them have a reputation score of 80 or more. Only 4 authors do not, and all of them have a reputation score of at least 70, 3 of them over 75. These are the power brokers of Hive.
Note that beneficiary posts are included in these. In fact, one particular poster earns far more in beneficiary income than in raw author income. @taskmaster4450le receives more than 75 percent of his author rewards as beneficiary income. Beneficiary rewards come when another account authors a post and designates that some or all of the author rewards earned from that post go to another account.
Here's an example of what that looks like:
@taskmaster4450 has two accounts. He writes to one and designates beneficiary rewards to the other. You can see the 99.00% designator under the breakdown of rewards for this post. It means 99 percent of the author rewards for this post by @taskmaster4450 are going to @taskmaster4450le.
I didn't research this, but I'd conjecture that this happens on the regular. Maybe he doesn't designate his second account as beneficiary on every post, but he does it often enough that his second account has managed to enter the top 20 in author rewards. This is a legitimate way to boost the author rewards for one account by using another, more powerful, account.
Note that the highest author rewards fall between the 2,500 and 3,000 mark. The time period is one month and I'm going to guess that the numbers represented are in Vests (a technical term, which I won't go into here). Now let's look at the highest curation reward earners for the same time period.
Most of the top 20 highest-earning curators on Hive for this period are curation trails. These are special accounts that upvote and curate posts based on their own values. Many of these curation trails use manual curation, which means an actual person (usually a volunteer) clicks the upvote button as opposed to a bot doing the work. I generally support curation trails that use a manual process rather than an automated one. Other curators, such as @themarkymark and @theycallmedan, are individuals. Both of these curators are Hive witnesses.
What's interesting is that the highest-earning curator on Hive is @appreciator, a curation trail. That account has earned between 70,000 and 80,000 Vests in the same timeframe that the top author reward earner piled up approximately 2,800. The lowest of the top 20 curators earned a total of 10,000 Vests. Not too shabby.
As you can see, there is huge potential to earn a lot of rewards through curation as opposed to simply being an author. Why is that?
Before I get into why curation rewards are easier to obtain than author rewards, I've got one other chart to share with you. Again, a big thanks to @dalz for doing the legwork on this.
The following chart shows the top Hive earners from all of the categories. Note that the highest earner on Hive for this time period was an account that earned 100 percent of its rewards from the DHF Fund.
@valueplan is a Hive account operated by several top Hive users and does promotional work on behalf of Hive. You can get a fuller explanation here. The DHF Fund (stands for Decentralized Hive Fund) is an account that is used to fund activities that benefit the entire Hive blockchain. Many of the projects it funds are development projects, but not all of them. To receive funding from the DHF, an account must present a proposal to the community and community votes on whether that proposal is accepted. Needless to say, @valueplan is an account that is widely supported on Hive, which is why it is the most rewarded account on the blockchain.
But look at the second highest-earning account - @appreciator, the account that is also the highest earning in curation rewards. In fact, 100 percent of its rewards are from curation. That makes sense since it is a curation trail.
If you look real close, @leofinance is the only account among the top 20 earners that receives any portion of its rewards in author rewards. Even then, a very small portion of its total rewards are author rewards. Most of the rewards received for that account are from the DHF and the remainder are witness rewards.
One more point: Of the top 20 Hive earners, 10 of them earn some portion of their rewards from the DHF. Five of them earn some portion as witness rewards. Four of them earn some portion of their rewards from HBD (Hive-Backed Dollars) interest. One of them earn some portion of rewards as author rewards. Twelve of the top 20 Hive earners earn some portion of their rewards as curation rewards.
So, what does this mean?
In my mind, these three charts illustrate that curation rewards are the best way to earn income from Hive whether you are an individual, a curation trail, a business, or a witness and whether you are a veteran Hive user with a high reputation or a brand new Hive user.
And now, to answer the Why question:
Remember, I'm comparing author rewards to curation rewards. Witness rewards, DHF, and HBD interest fall into a different bucket than content creation. They are mostly passive income streams whereas author and curation rewards are active income streams. You must do something to earn them (technically, you must do something for DHF and witness rewards, too, but those activities do not involve content creation).
With author rewards, you must create content. And it must be sufficiently high-quality content in order to attract a good cross-section of creators to upvote it. That takes time. And, based on my experience as an author, the payoff is not very often worth the time and effort to produce the content. In other words, I can spend three hours crafting a knockout blog post and only earn $10 from that blog post. That doesn't make much economic sense. I do it because I love creating content.
On the other hand, you can spend that three hours looking for excellent posts to upvote and earn far more than you would as an author.
One caveat: Each time you vote on the blockchain weakens your voting power. The following image shows my current voting power on the Hive blockchain. (Virtually everything can be discovered on one of the Hive block explorers that capture all of this data.)
HiveStats tells me how long I have before my voting power reaches 100 percent.
Because curation can be done in a shorter amount of time than content creation, I can find posts on topics of interest to me, written by account holders that I admire, and curate more content more quickly. And if I wanted to focus only on the trending posts on Hive, many of which are earning in the hundreds of dollars, I could do that and capitalize on curating high-earning posts rather than posts that are earning only a few cents in seven days.
The bottom line is this: If your goal is to earn rewards on Hive, there are strategies you can use to increase your earnings and one of those is to focus on content curation rather than content creation.
Feel free to connect with me on the following Web3 publishing platforms.
3 Reasons you should collect this post:
This is a historic moment as I hit my highest earnings to date from Web3 social media platforms. You can help me commemorate this moment by collecting this post.
I make a bold prediction at the end of this post. If you collect this post and I'm correct, you'll thank me later.
You want to support me and help me continue doing what I love.
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Allen Taylor
