How many $0.02 disappointments did successful authors overcome, before they had a winner?
Lets find out.
Who is a successful writer?
For this analysis, I have determined that a successful author is anyone that has at least 1 successful post. A successful post has $500 in SBD rewards. I have ignored the SP part of the reward, meaning that the actual rewards on the successful post had been at least $1,000.
Here is what I did:
- I parsed Steem blockchain for all users with at least 1M Vests
- I looked at each users blogging history, and the rewards for each post
- If the user had at least 1 post with $500+ SBD reward, he was in
It turns out that we have 280 authors in the "winners club".
It took them on average 13.81 posts to make it.
Average SBD portion of the reward was 1,452 SBD for the first winning post.
Here is a distribution of winning posts and their SBD payouts:
We can see that most of the successful authors made it fairly early in their Steemit careers, thanks to the novelty of the platform, and lack of competition.
Some of these had an advantage of being an already well known and reputable figure in the crypto community.
However, if we look at the bottom right section of the distribution, we can see the real heroes.
These are the people who saw their hard work turn into sub $2 posts time and time again, and they kept working hard and improving their game. Until one day, they made it.
Just look at that poor guy on the far right.
He had to write 265 posts before one of them made it.
Now, that is persistence.
If we remove the the extreme cases, the distribution looks like this:
When our authors finally scored, how big was their reward?
On average, the SBD portion of the reward was $1,452 SBD, or about $3,000 in total.
Here are the top 10:
| User | Winning Post N. | SBD Payout |
|---|---|---|
| steemdrive | 1 | $10,339 |
| infovore | 48 | $8,674 |
| jl777 | 2 | $8,579 |
| allasyummyfood | 2 | $8,546 |
| riensen | 6 | $6,749 |
| blockchaingirl | 1 | $5,236 |
| kyletorpey | 1 | $5,159 |
| benslayton | 1 | $4,635 |
| thisisbenbrick | 2 | $4,247 |
| brookdemar | 1 | $4,010 |
Note, that the payout only represents the SBD portion of a payout (50%).
Conclusion
It seems like despite the influx of new users, the number of daily posts is going down.
Whether people are giving up on their writing, or we're cutting down spam and plagiarism is unclear. Perhaps its both.
I am happy with the overall distribution. It shows that if you're good, you're going to make it - sooner than later.
If you love to write, my hopes are you won't give up too soon.