Splinterlands Dominates Top Viewed Posts on Hive.
For the past two years, a Splinterlands post has won the Top Weekly Viewed award on Peakd.com almost every week. Occasionally other Hive gaming content such as Rising Star games or Golem Overlord manage to edge Splinterlands out for the top spot, but those are the exceptions. Usually Splinterlands wins.
In fact very often, it's not even a Splinterlands post made that week. The post may have been made a week or even a month before, and still in terms of views it's beating everything else posted that week.
Before this month, the last time an account not relating to Splinterlands, Golem Overlord or Rising Star Games got the most viewed weekly post was in November 2021, when @punksonhive was launched. That is almost a year and a half ago.
All that is to say, Hive-gaming content absolutely dominates Hive when it comes to actually bringing eyeballs into the ecosystem.
Streak Broken - New Streak Started
In the first week of May, for the first time in 76 weeks, a new contender managed to place first for the top viewed weekly post on peakd.com.
@zirochka was the first author on Hive in nearly 18 months to beat out the Hive-Gaming accounts to a top viewed weekly post. Then, not only did she beat it once, but she is on the verge of doing it a second week in a row.
You may notice in the screenshot above, her post is pretty much neck and neck with Splinterlands again, and it's possible it will be edged out in the last few hours of the week. Update: It has now gotten the award.
How did it happen?
Well firstly these are compelling and interesting stories of personal experience, in an ongoing event. It's also a well written blog full of emotion and context for how these pieces are understood by Ukrainians.
However, that alone is not how a post manages to get enough views to reach the top weekly post on peakd.com. These posts by @zirochka were shared on appropriate communities in Reddit. Because they were appropriate and the content was interesting to those users, they were able to rise up without being deleted by the mods. Even relatively small subreddits have an enormous amount of traffic compared to anything in our Hive space. In the end, that is all it takes to beat everything else on Hive in terms of views - even the Hive-gaming content which usually dominates.
There are many high quality, interesting posts on Hive, as we have a dedicated commuity here constantly curating Hive to ensure that high quality posts are encouraged and rewarded. However, the incentives to focus on getting curated on Hive have also encouraged an inward focus, where we make little attempt to get our posts seen by the outside world. Even those attempts we do make, such as sharing on Twitter, we have little data to determine just how much outside traffic that actually generates.
Introducing Eyes on Hive
In the few days I have been running some contests to try and reward users for bringing traffic into the Hive ecosystem, by sharing Hive posts and aiming to make them the top viewed post of the day. I put up funds for the bounty out of my own (and @danday's) pockets, as well as the rewards for the post.
Going forward I plan to make it a daily competition - where both the author of the top viewed post each day gets a reward, and users who generate traffic get a reward. The last two contests required that the post become #1 for the day as well as at least 1500 views. I will scale that requirement down - the user who drives some traffic will merely need to beat all other contestants to win the reward. So if you think 1500 views is too hard, it may be possible to win with a much smaller number of views.
The contests will be funded by the current bounty if nobody wins it today, as well as the author rewards from this post and all related contest posts going forward. That way, a very small portion of the reward pool will be redirected towards rewarding users for bringing in traffic.
In the future, if these contests are in any way successful, I will try to run a short term but larger scale experiment where the funds are provided by the DHF.
Reddit is a really good place to share posts and is the reason we picked it up after Twitter, that said it's not as easy and you gotta do some research or test your way through subreddits over time. Many have way too many rules, don't accept links from non-giant platforms/socials but there's a lot of smaller-medium sized ones that don't care about that. I've been in contact with some people to put some research into this to create some lists of where people could share more frequently without getting shadow/banned to give others some ideas in a compilation post. But everyone is free to already share and earn some rewards for it in terms of comment upvotes or POSH through @redditposh. We're going to also increase the POSH issuance towards Reddit as currently it's 25/250 with the rest going towards Twitter which is on a break atm while we revamp the way it works due to the API changes.
Feel free to check it out btw, similar to Twitter this also requires people to sign up on hiveposh.com so we'd know who to reward here based on their Reddit shares (if not signed up posh and hive rewards will go to @null/hbdstabilizer), you can see some shares in the daily posts getting up to 20 POSH which is like 5 Hive these days so it's on a good way towards incentivizing more and better sharing over time.
Edit: another thing to note that the hive links don't need to be shared as links to earn POSH neither, they can also be shared in the body as seen by some of the submissions that earned POSH recently on @redditposh.
You do have to be sensitive to subreddit rules and culture, and even if you do share Hive links it can't be the main thing you do with your account. That said, on Twitter and such you really need to have an established following, Reddit has potential for massive views even if you have 0 followers.
Looking back at my own record on Reddit, some of my posts there have likely had tens to hundreds of thousands of views (they don't have view counters on Reddit, but you can estimate based on upvotes and comments, you can get way more views than either of those) and I obviously don't have a single follower on Reddit. And I'm just some guy who just sometimes makes posts.
Also, the posts I've had which made for such views had so much less effort involved in the making than basically anything we post on Hive. They were all shorter than this comment.
I actually saw a link to one of her posts on Facebook thanks to @ericvancewalton. I hope that helped generate some hits
Hmm
That was a nice win. I hope I get on that list someday
Well there has to be consumers to consume certain content... People like deep emotional stories and they certainly do like games 😂 laughs
I myself doubt I'll make it up there😂loving the whole idea behind this contest.
Going forward, I will remove the requirement to be #1 and also the 1500 views requirement. That should make it easier to win, but it will also be a lower daily bounty (unless I get significant funding).
You are really doing a great work promoting hive
Thank you, though the point I am trying to make is that the community needs to be encouraged to pursue web traffic in much the same way we encourage quality content and engagement now.
This is a really good initiative @demotruk and I would be glad if we can have more participants
This way we see how much good work you have been doing for a long time and are trying hard to promote it so that new users on top of it and it becomes more popular around the world.