Web3 Social Earnings, August 2023
Hive curation is where it's at
Collectors of this post will receive 500 Taylor Tokens ($TAYL).
In late July, I announced that I would be taking a break a August. I did, and now I'm back.
The break was a time of reflection for me and a time for me to reassess my content goals in light of my business goals. I'll discuss that more next week. For now, I want to give the rundown on my Web3 social media earnings from August.
Since I took a posting break from almost all social media platforms, my earnings were meager. However, I did not take a complete break from Hive. I posted some original content, minimally, but I also was accepted as a guest curator for @ecency, one of the top curation trails and Hive front ends. What that means, on the practical level, is I spent about an hour each day, with a couple of exceptions, upvoting content from other creators. Other than that, I didn't spend much time creating new content for any of the platforms.
While I didn't create much new content, that doesn't mean I didn't earn rewards. Some of the platforms did manage to produce some residual rewards from the previous month. Here's the rundown. (NOTE: Platforms that produced no rewards for August aren't mentioned.)
gFam (XRP)
While I did not post any new content on gFam in August, I did earn 0.764 XRP tokens from content published in July. The end-of-month value of that XRP was $0.3897164.
USD Value Earned (Rounded Down) = $0.38
Paragraph (MATIC)
I'm a little surprised by Paragraph, but I did manage to sell an NFT from one of my July newsletters. That's always encouraging. I earned 1.9 MATIC from that sale. The end-of-month USD value was $1.0507.
USD Value Earned (Rounded Down) = $1.0507
Publish0x (AMPL/ETH/SPOT)
Publish0x made an interesting announcement in the middle of last month. The platform is switching from Ethereum to Optimism. I can't think of anything more exciting.
Along with that change, they are sunsetting AMPL and SPOT as tipping tokens and replacing them with OP. I don't much care what the tokens are as long as they're useful, and I found no use for AMPL or SPOT. OP is Optimism's governance token, which means I am less likely to convert it to another token. I have not purchased any OP in the past, but if I earn some, then I can at least participate in Optimism governance. That's a big plus, and it could lead to me purchasing OP at some point in the future.
I can't imaging a Publish0x where the tipping tokens are ETH and OP, but that's what's coming. Current AMPL and SPOT held in user wallets will be converted to OP at some point in the future. That makes me wish I had kept all of my AMPL and SPOT rather than trading it in for other cryptocurrencies. But who knew the future?
At any rate, I did receive some residual rewards from July's content. Those are as follows:
0.2623 AMPL = $0.28
0.00018901 ETH = $0.36
0.5737 SPOT = $0.65
USD Value Earned = $1.29
Torum (XTM)
I didn't expect to earn any XTM in August, but I did manage to snag 2. That translates into an end-of-month equivalent of $0.04364 USD.
USD Value Earned (Rounded Down) = $0.04364
Hive (HIVE/HBD)
While the above residual rewards were nice to see, none of them get me excited. Hive is a different story. In just one hour a day upvoting other people's content, I managed to earn 12.969 Hive Power (HP) and 2.22 HIve-Backed Dollars (HBD). I also posted 24 blog posts, but most of them were Actifit reports. Only three of them were thought pieces, and one of them was July's Web3 social media earnings report.
The Web3 earnings report earned a disappointing $0 with 3 votes. But my other two original posts each earned over $1. The highest earning post for the month was a poem, which earned almost $3 ($2.72 to be exact). I also had an Actifit report earn more than $1 and a couple came close to that. The rest all earned less than 20 cents.
Actifit is a Hive activity tracker. I earn AFIT rewards by tracking my activity, but I earn HIVE and HBD by posting my activity reports each day. I don't post on days when I register less than 5,000 activity points.
The key to Hive is to follow curation trails. I was following several of these when I started curating for Ecency, but I paused them for the month of August so that they didn't trigger Ecency votes when I voted for the content.
The way curation trails work is like this: You follow the curation trail and set your voting percentage. When a curation trail you follow votes for content, it automatically triggers a vote from you. I only follow curation trails that I trust. That ensures that I am only voting for content that I would typically vote for if I was voting manually.
Curation trails are controversial. Some people don't like them. I think they are a good thing if they're not abused. The ones I follow utilize manual curators with a good eye for excellent content. I stay away from those with which I am not familiar or that specialize in a particular type of content such as language-based, niche communities, and such. I want to know that my upvotes are going toward good content of some reasonable measure.
That said, I've now reactivated my curation trails for September. The reason I mention them is because a good portion of my earnings each month come from those. Essentially, I replaced my curation trail earnings with Ecency earnings in August. I think this practical experiment proves the value of curating on Hive. Here's why.
In August, I earned half of much HP as I earned in July from both author and curation rewards. My curation rewards in HBD from Ecency posts alone were about one-quarter of last month's rewards from all curation activity including curation trails. My HBD earnings from my Hive Savings Account in August was 5.376. That equates to an end-of-month value of $5.2727808.
My end-of-month USD values for HP and HBD, respectively, in August were $3.6157572 and $2.119878.
One more caveat: While curating for Ecency, most of my curation votes were in the 10% range. That ensured I could spread my votes around more. I'd have been limited in the number of votes I could have each day if I'd have voted them all at 100%. That said, I could have gone higher than 10% on most of the votes. If I had, my earnings would have been slightly higher.
Total USD Value Earned (Rounded Down) = $10.99
Conclusion
My biggest disappointment for August was Presearch. I earned no rewards, and I think the reason why is that I'd inadvertently turned off my rewards for the month. Since I discovered that yesterday, I've turned my rewards on again and have already seen an increase.
I will volunteer to do more Ecency curation in the future. Based on this experiment, I plan to put more energy in Hive, especially Hive curation.
Connect With Me On Web3
Feel free to connect with me on the following Web3 publishing platforms.
Publish0x (Note: If you join Publish0x using this link, I'll get a small portion of tips, but my portion will come from the platform's share rather than yours, and at no expense to you.)
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