How are Hivers doing with the length of their posts? Is posts length increased or decreased? What is the average length of a post on Hive? How many words in a post are enough? Are longer posts rewarded more on Hive?
Let’s take a look at the data for post length and payouts based on this.
Here we will be looking at the number of characters and words per post, what is the average and how does the daily numbers fluctuate. Then we will be taking a look at the payouts for the posts according to their length and categorize them.
The period that is analyzed here is 2020-2025.
Total Number of Posts
First an overall look at the number of posts per day in the period. These are post only, comments not included. Here is the chart.
The number of posts per day has increased towards 2022, reaching 5k at ATH, and then in the following years dropped in the range of 2k to 3k.
There was an increase at the end of 2024 when the HIVE prices increased as well, and a drop since then to around 2k post a day where we are now.
Total Number of Characters in Posts
Here is a chart for the daily number of characters from posts.
The blockchain has data of body length, or number of characters per post. When we sum those up, on a daily level we get the above. This chart follows the post chart trend. The numbers of characters per day is between 8M to 10M per day.
The number of characters by itself doesn’t tell us much.
Number of Words per Post
Here is the chart.
From here we can notice that the number of words per posts has been steadily increasing in the period. It has started to around 500 words per posts on average in 2020 and grew towards 800 words per posts in 2023. In 2024 we have somewhat stabilization around the 800 words per posts, and a slow increase again in the last period to 850 words per post.
There is a spike towards the end of October 2024, that has been short lived, some type of anomaly and probably some botting.
It’s quite amazing to see that the average length of posts has been growing trough the years.
As mentioned above, the blockchain only has data for number of characters per post, not a word count. I have converted the numbers of characters in words based on an average of 5 characters per word. Its not a 100% exact number but close enough.
Note that videos are usually short on characters, that doesn’t represent their length.
Posts Length and Payouts
If we categorize the number of posts according to their word count, we get this chart. This is data for October 2025.
We can see here that the shortest posts with 500 or less are on the top. As the post length increases, the number of posts is getting smaller. But interesting that the last category, more than 2500 words has more post than the previous one 2k to 2.5k words in a post.
What About Payouts?
Are longer posts getting rewarder more than short posts?
Here is the chart for payouts according to posts word count in the last 30 days.
We can see quite an even position when it comes to payouts for the top three categories. Posts above 1500 words are on average getting $8 or slightly more. Then comes the posts between 1k to 1.5k words with just below $8.
The posts under 500 words on average earn $2 and the posts in the range 2k to 2.5k earn on average $7.
Longer post obviously earn more.
But as we can see the post from 1k to 1.5k words are very close in the earning to the longer posts and they are the most efficient in terms of earnings per word.
Who is Making the Longest Posts?
Here is the chart for authors who are making the longer posts in the last 30 days.
@geekgirl is on the top here with a post with 12k words. One post in the period with a big table in it.
On the second spot is @curangel followed by @bpcvoter1, both curation accounts.
All the best
@dalz
A better methodology is to count the spaces to obtain word count. Also to trim out any markdown syntax, links or html using regex.
Have you had a play with my Hive Report Card tool? It does a lot of analytics on a per author basis, and pulls from the condenser API. I do not include rewards in this analysis as I want it to be about the content :)
https://holoz0r.github.io/HiveReportCard/
cool. for me.. the sweet spot is about 300 words. i find i can say/show what i wanted in that amount. and it doesn't take all day to make a post also. :P
Cool :)
Quality and effort are still important on Hive Longer posts may earn more but the balance between depth and engagement is what really pays off.
I'm curious about how many of these word counts are just posts that are doubled in length by the fact that they're translated into English. Is it something you're factoring in? So they're not really a full post reaching 1k, but more 500, for example.
Yes, and people who have signatures with 4000 images in them
I assumed it would be the case. Most posts I see are like 300 words. And the ones above that tend to be translated thus doubling the word count. It was also something I tried to factor in back when I was a curator.
Not a lot of people do that, sadly. I am very against posts in multiple languages, given that peakd and every modern web browser can translate with a single click...
For some reason it's usually those posts that manage to reel in relatively frequent and decent rewards, they're either on autovote lists or just constantly curated. Can't say I mind it if the first language does actually reach a good word count or if it's a good photography post for example. There's one person I've noticed that somehow manages to get $50 on posts with just 500 and below words. Hive is weird sometimes.
Also noticing this stuff made me start decreasing my own word count. For the longest time I was stuck in this mentality carried over from Steem that 'good content' was long content. But yeah that's really not the case haha
I will never again compromise on my quality, I will never "Take the piss" with my content. When I looked back on my old content (using the tool that I made, lol) - The only person I'm not being honest to and disappointing if I choose to do that again (low effort, quick posts) is myself.
But, perhaps my definition of low effort changes as time goes on, and I get a higher standard for myself.
I am very delusional, if I haven't mentioned that before, but also incredibly self critical.
Yeah I started seeing my own posts as me trying to stretch out the length as much as I could, as if I had to reach at least 1k words or couldn't hit that publish button. That nobody would even consider reading if not. Since then I dropped that mentality, I'm a bit more concise and straight to the point with things.
Film reviews and travel posts still tend to run a bit longer because there's generally just more to say, but I stopped it with the photography posts where it really is more about the images.
I'm also just a bit more aware of my time and how much I'm putting in here when I could be pursuing a few of my 500 other hobbies. Figuring out that balance has never been something I'm good at, it would be all in one thing at a time, and throughout the past decade Hive has somehow been the most central thing. Not so much these days. I am happy to take a break if I feel it, and no longer feel that FOMO or any guilt.
I think it interesting to see that even though the daily number of posts varies, the average word count continues to increase.
The data on efficiency between 1k and 1.5k words is interesting because it shows a potential perfect balance between time and performance on Hive.