The Hive ecosystem provides users with a diverse array of opportunities to earn the Hive cryptocurrency. So whether you're an investor, entrepreneur, developer, content creator or content consumer, you have several different options available to you to earn Hive.
Posting to earn is probably the best known earning strategy on Hive, but this is far from your only option, you can also earn by curating, playing games, and developing projects on Hive, and more. Below I cover a total of 12 diverse way you can earn Hive.
12 Ways to earn on Hive
Posting content
There are numerous forms of content you can post to Hive, using different front ends. The main type of content posted are blogs of various forms, on Hive.blog and PeakD, but you can also post video content to 3Speak, a Hive platform which champions Freedom of Speach which is rapidly becoming home to those deplatformed from mainstream social media.
The amount you earn depends on the stake weighted Vests which vote for you. According to @arcange's Hive statistics, the average post on Hive currently earns 4HBD, or approximately $4 split between creators and curators, so there is the potential for ordinary bloggers to earn a decent second income.
It's worth looking at posting within the Hive tribes, especially Leofinance and OCD, which are two communities that allow for a broad range of topics to be posted and can offer generous rewards, the former focused on finance, the later more general.
There are also many communities and indivduals who run regular challenges, where you can earn nice upvotes and/ or other prizes for posting content around a particular theme. For example:
The @Splinterlands challenge of the week is a good example of this - you upload a video of a battle according to the rules of the challenge and analyse your strategy - the best posts get a reward worth several Hive.
The Your Top 3 contest is another interesting example of an innovative competition, and anyone can take part - you make a post, devote your pay-out to the contest rewards pool, and then paricipants vote on the best top three post, the winner wins all the payouts from all the posts!
If you're an artist or a musician then you'd do well to follow @isaria who runs a lot of competitions which reward creative content.
You should take the time to explore the communities you might like to post to and make sure you follow their specific posting guidelines.
There's something of an unwritten rule that you shouldn't post more than twice a day from one account. Most people who post to earn limit themselves to posting once a day (a few post twice), focusing of producing content of a decent quality.
Of course you can post what you like as often as you like. You are more than welcome to upload as many quick-shot selfies or quick-links to game-battles as you like, and both just for the bants, just don't expect people to vote on them.
Commenting
Many of the people who earn a decent income from 'quality' daily posts have spent several months, if not years, building up a following by engaging with other people's content on Hive.
If you're part of a topic-specific community, it is natural to engage and comment on other people's work - it's just simply friendly, polite and basically just 'nice' - many people prefer decent comments to votes.
The added bonus on Hive is that you might get a cheeky little upvote on some of your comments and earn a little bit of extra Hive, as well as Tribe tokens (see below for more details on these).
You might even be visited by Mr Engagement and earn 'ENGAGE' on top, if somebody with over 1000 ENGAGE tokens calls the Engage bot.
If you're interested in taking commenting and engagement to the next level you should join Asher's (@abh12345) Engagement Leagues - he runs a league table you can win Hive for tanking - for making the most comments on posts - factoring in length of comments and a range of other things too!
Curating
Hive posting rewards get split 50-50 between creators and curators (the people who vote on the content) - so you are rewarded just for voting.
It's not unusual for accounts to earn a 12% annual ROI just on voting for content.
There is a bit of an art to maximizing your curation returns - the optimum time to vote on a post is around 2.5 minutes, and to hit this you'll need to use Hive-vote, so your votes go out automatically.
I personally only use this with some accounts who I know produce content I like, of a consistently good quality, and I also manual vote. If you see a good post early on and front-run larger votes which might come later, you get a better curation return.
The mechanics of curation are quite complex - if you want to find out more, this is a good post by @tarazkp: How Does Curation Work on Hive?
Delegating
Delegating is one of the most powerful tools on Hive - it allows you to invest in a project or business and earn a return without risking your capital.
If you Power Up Hive, you can delegate to a number of projects which will pay you out a decent return. Many of these are curation projects - accounts which have high HP because of incoming delegations able to give relatively high rewards to the content they vote on, chosen by the users who control the accounts.
Two examples of accounts you can delegate to include @curangel and @hodlcommunity - both offer a return of about 10%, and they focus on voting quality content, effectively doing your voting for you.
Delegating is one of the easiest, most passive ways of earning on Hive, just make sure you're delegating to an account with standards.
Earning interest on Staking
Even easier than delegating, you earn just by staking Hive - 15% of Hive Inflation, or Newly Printed Hive gets awarded to accounts who have vested, or Powered Up Hive. So if you Vest, and do nothing, you will still see your Hive Power increase every day!
Trading on Hive-Engine
Hive-Engine is a side-chain of Hive - it is an exchange which lists the tokens used by Hive communities, Tribes and Games, and you can buy these tokens directly with Hive, as well as with other cryptocurrencies such as BTC and LTC.
These tokens have different functionalities depending on the applications they are linked to, but trading in and out of these coins offers you another (risky) way to make more Hive.
The most accessible way to trade on Hive-engine is through the LeoDex.
There can be some nice trading opportunities: if you'd have bought LEO in May 2020, you would have qaudrupuled your investment had you sold in June:
Tribes and Communities
There are several communities on Hive focused on specific interest topics, and you might find the highest level of engagement and rewards within these communities. I'm not sure if it's an official definition but the way I understand it is that a 'Hive Tribe' is simply a community with its own front end and Hive-Engine token.
One of the most successful communities on hive is leofinance - it has its own front end, token (LEO) and applications such as Hivestats and LeoDex (trading) interface - if you post finance related content through the Leo front end you stand a change of winning a decent upvote from some of the LEO whales, who are different from the Hive whales.
For newer users, exploring the Tribes could be the most effective way for you to get noticed and make an impact.
Gaming
Splinterlands is the most successful blockchain game of all time, and it's on Hive - you can earn DEC (the currency) and reward cards just by playing! And because you own the cards you buy, buying cards can be treated as investment. You can buy a $2 pack (or much cheaper on Hive-Engine with DEC) of untamed cards and you stand a chance of receiving one of these, currently on the market for > $20.
Another game to watch out for on Hive is eXode (@exodegame) - it's in its very early stages of development, but having just opened 100 booster packs I can testify to the fact that it's got that addictive factor!
For a current list of all Hive games see HiveProjects.io.
@Actifit
Possibly the easiest money you'll earn posting content on Hive is through @actifit - just download the app to your phone, record your steps and upload your achievement to Hive - if you get to > 5000 steps in a day you'll get an upvote from the @actifit account.
Developing and other Hive Projects
I'm not a developer myself, but Hive does have a very well funded Decentralised Hive Fund which exists to pay developers for evolving Hive - so if you want to work on a Hive Dapp or Front End you can apply to the decentralised fund to be paid for your work. The fund has a daily budget of 5000 HBD, and proposals can be voted on by anyone with a vested stake in Hive.
Running a Witness
Anyone is welcome to set up a witness to help secure the chain on Hive - if you receive enough votes to make it into the Top 20, you can earn a decent amount of money! The top 20 witnesses each sign about a block a minute and are rewarded 0.245 Hive per block, which works out to around 130 000 Hive a year.
Linking your Business to Hive
If you run a business that uses WooCommerce, there is a plugin you can download which allows people to pay you - in Hive! This post by @roomservice explains how you can get it active on your WordPress blog.
NB there are other ways you can leverage Hive for your business - you could buy Hive, power up your account and then get people to produce marketing material for you here on Hive, and pay them in upvotes!
TLDR; how can you earn Hive?
- Posting
- Commenting
- Curating
- Delegating
- Staking and earning interest
- Hive-Engine
- Working with the Tribes
- Gaming
- Actifitting
- Developing
- Running a Witness
- Linking your business to Hive
And that's just 'for now'.
As the Hive ecosystem develops and evolves further, a greater diversity of earning opportunities will no doubt emerge!
Shared to Twitter and Quora:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-different-ways-to-earn-Hive/answer/Karl-Thompson-13
Superb post! I'm enjoying the gradual exploration of all of these things, so it is terrific to see them laid out in one place (and I know, there are more...)
So far, I'm a posting, commenting, and gaming kind of Hivian. These are the things that I am most comfortable doing.
Posting - I love creating content. I still have not quite figured out if I prefer using hive as a candid diary or as a 'proper' blog on specific topics/genres/niches.
Commenting - I really enjoy the contact with other people from often very different walks of life. This feels like an almost infinite delight.
Gaming - I am seriously getting into Splinterlands and it really is quite merrily absorbing and brain-teasing. Exode is also something that looks right up my street but I will wait until payday to join in :-) As a former game developer in my early life I still have not quite buried my desire to realise some of my unborn games. I'm watching blockchain game dev very closely now to see if this is the format that I might like to develop in at some point.
The whole finance and tech side of Hive fascinates me. I just have not quite got my head around it all yet. Leo looks fascinating. But I have yet to open a proper exchange trading account to buy and sell and there are seemingly a bewildering array of ways to do it. My usual gambit is to copy what somebody that I know and trust has already done. :-)
I like the idea of people being able to buy my stuff using Hive, but I'd have to (so far) switch to using WooCommerce (which I suppose I could do).
I'm waiting for @Actifit to integrate with Strava, smart watches like my Garmin, etc. The basic sensors in Actifit are OKish but they seem to miss a lot of activity for me. Also the app is quite power-draining. So it would be superb if it could accept even just my Strava activity. That one change alone would open @Actifit up to compatibility with a host of devices.
So thanks for this great post :-) Sparked a lot of thoughts and reflections from me.
Hey cheers,
In terms of posting you can always do both, on two accounts if necessary.
It's worth exploring all the avenues certainly, and if you did want to get a game up and running, Hive would be a good candidate - eXode is a risky investment, but it dow look very interesting and potentially a lot of fun, the cards are nice.
Splinterlands is not unlike Poker once you get into it and see the same opponents every now and then!
I tend to rely on Bittrex as my main exchange, works fine!
There are two areas of blockchain/Hive that I'm not sure about in terms of ethics and etiquette.
Should I separate out some of my activities rather than have quite a diverse range of things on just the one account? My posts will range from gaming video let's plays, to beekeeping, to writing, to photography, to personal development, to fitness, to sociology, to game development, to business and marketing, to short narrative video and film, to medieval literature and history, to RPGs, to science fiction, to daily blogging and vlogging like a diary... etc. I'm still figuring out what the consequences might be of putting everything out on this account or separating some interests into separate accounts (business and finance; game dev and gaming and RPG; sociology and culture; personal development and daily blogging/vlogging). and then, is it OK to reblog content from one of my accounts on another account if I think it's relevant? Or would that just look like self-promotion rather than careful curation?
Then, there's how I use content. Is there an unwritten expectation about say, if I post a let's play series of me playing Minecraft on 3Speak, and then also uploading the same video series to a YouTube account? Past experience tells me to upload to any and all platforms however I wish; it's my content after all. But it seems a bit strange to say, upload the same content to 3Speak and Dtube etc.
How other people use their multiple accounts, and how other people use their content across multiple platforms, is something I'm interested in finding out more about. Seeing examples of it might help me figure out what I am happy with I guess.
Personally I tend to post along the same themes with my main account and I use alts for selfies and actifit.
You can always just post within specific communities with your main account, different topics.
As to posting on multiple platforms, I don't with blogs but when it comes to videos, which I only do very occassionaly, I might use YouTube - I don't think it's an ethical no go zone to post on multiple platforms!
How about arbitrage through the internal market? I guess only whales can really do that.
Fair point!
I didn't think of Arbitrage!
Although the point of these posts is to shill Hive, and I'm not sure if having more Arbers would have a beneficial effect... wouldn't that increase price fluctuations, which I'm not sure is advantageous for people looking for a stable return, I tend to see Hive as about stable returns.
Stable-ish, it is crypto after all. And that's just from my limited experience.
!ENGAGE 25
ENGAGEtokens.That's very interesting about WooCommerce - I hadn't come across that before. I'm astonished sometimes how many opportunities there are here. The other interesting thing is tipping - whether tipu or the tipping feature on peakd (I guess it is on the other front ends as well, I haven't checked).
You know I was going to add in a paragraph on tipping at the end of that first section, but I'd spent so long writing the damn thing, not helped by these,
Eventually I just couldn't be arsed.
@roomservice - the guy that wrote that WooCommerce post and who won @themarkymarks hackathon, which was one of the best recent things on Hive - and damn I should have added that in - is a real asset to the platform!
The problem I've got is I don't feel my understanding of hive is evolving, check this out:
I got a reply from @crokkon - which shows the 'raw data' involved in working out the curation returns on one post, so far....
http://scot-api.steem-engine.com/@tarazkp/how-does-curation-work-on-hive-what-are-the-rules-posting-and-voting-limits?hive=1
I'm just a Hive Hack!
That isn't something I should open unawares first thing in the morning!
It was a very comprehensive article and a valiant effort. I love you doing these sorts of articles, delving around and bringing it all together.
Cheers, today I'll be writing about a Steemmonsters battle, very much the other end of the scale!
Hehe :)
Love this. Very detailed, in fact!
Can you believe we both posted at the same time? Same topic. Just an hour here and there!
And I bet yours is so much better than mine, I'll give a read shortly!
Posted Using LeoFinance
I've earned in the past from the first six ways you mentioned, this 12 ways proves that hive is really undervalued out there and this various choices means a person is spoilt with choices just by buying into hive. Hope HIVE hits that breakthrough soon enough.
It is crazy the amount of ways there are to earn money, gaming looks especially promising going forwards!
Posted Using LeoFinance
Learned new stuff here, and learned I've got a lot more to learn. Brick by brick.
I'm still learning myself, there's a lot to get your head around!
Posted Using LeoFinance
Good and informative publication. Thank you for the useful work. Good luck and all the best.
Actually, I thought everything was limited to the first 5 on your list but you provided seven more.
This is really a great post.
Thanks for sharing. Hope you have a nice day
Something for everyone really. I don't think there is anything else out there quite like Hive (Steem has turned to crap lately). I hope to see more fun stuff from the community soon.
It really does seem to be coming on.
I'm getting the feeling that things are building - I'm getting a few more comments from people recently!
Posted Using LeoFinance
Thank you for the mention @revisesociology !
We truly appreciate it. Fully upvoted and reblogged.
Hive and HODL on ! 😜
Cheers and thanks for the curation efforts!
Posted Using LeoFinance
I have a few friends that own small businesses here in South Africa and will share your post with them.
Thank you for this!
I think the fact of being able to reward people without risking capital is one of Hive's biggest strengths from an investment persepctive!
Posted Using LeoFinance
Yes indeed and a bonus is that it will also draw new entrants into Hive.
Who knows how far this can go, as new entrants have families and friends.
Word of mouth is a powerful tool.
Thank you for this great reference.
Is there a list or post that you know of that has all the delegation sources and their requirements and return in one place?
Or maybe a dapp or service that has the stats?
Also, any info/resources on equipment requirements to run a witness?
Anyone, Anyone? Lol
Thanks
Peace
That's a very good question about delegations...
I don't think there is I'm afraid!
I'll have a dig around and get back to you when I find it!
On the witnesses - I suggest you drop into the Hive discord - https://discord.com/channels/689265414714163208/689891885434929174
And just ask the question in general chat - @crimsonclad hangs out in there and she runs one of the T20 witnesses - @followbtcnews
If you can play around this tool, you'd get some answers.
https://hive.dlease.io/
I think actifitting is too similar to posting. The only thing that makes it unique is most people have a separate account for this. But it is really no different than participating in any other posting initiative such as 'take a photo of a tree'.
Fair comment - I was being generous because they've developed an app that records how many times you wiggle your wrist in a day, which IS different to just posting!
Wow. 12 different ways to earn. I never knew some. I'd try it out. Thanks for the update
Have fun exploring!
I will. I have you to thank for showing me other ways.
Wicked post thanks i would like more in depth information on how to carry these tasks out for newbies