How Hive Power, Account Age and Post Count relate to Hive Rewards

In this post we look at the author and curation rewards for February 2023, and see how they have been distributed to users based on Hive Power, account age and post counts. The purpose is to see just how much time/work it takes to break into earning meaningful rewards on Hive, and with how much reliability you can expect to earn a certain amount of rewards after an amount of time or number of posts.

Distribution of Rewards

This first chart represents the distribution of rewards in terms of total dollar value among the top 50 earners (combined author and curation rewards), over the month of February.

Hive Power

The following chart is a scatter plot of how much rewards users earned as it relates to their Hive Power and the age of their accounts. Both axes are logarithmic in scale, and the color of each data point relates to the age of the account in years. To understand these charts, a stronger correlation is shown by a graph that looks like a tight line, up and to the right. A weaker relationship is one where the dots are scattered everywhere, and the colors also are widely spread out as opposed to concentrated together.

As can be seen clearly, more Hive Power means more rewards, and older accounts also make more rewards.

Here is the same chart but with only curation rewards included. We can see that the same trends apply, but there is a stronger relationship between Hive Power and curation rewards, as should be expected. This is the tightest relationship seen in this post. Nonetheless, the distribution does show that some accounts punch well above their weight when it comes to curation rewards.

Finally we have author rewards. The relationship between Hive Power and author rewards still exists, and is fairly strong, but it is much less of a tight relationship than it is for curation rewards. Note that Hive Power is measured at the end of the period, so any accounts that started with no HP will likely have some after they claimed their rewards, which is why you see very few receiving rewards with near 0 HP.

Post/Comment Count

It is often said that on Hive, if you put in the work, eventually you will build a following and the rewards will start to come in. The "work" in Hive is not just making posts and comments, it is a social network and there are many ways you may need to "work", but posting and commenting surely form a big part of it. So let's look at how much people earn based on how many posts and comments they have made in the past.

For combined author and curation rewards, we can see a very clear pattern of more posts, more years = more rewards.

It is particularly true for author rewards.

Still true for curation rewards, but it is a looser relationship.

For the sake of completion, here is also a chart showing the relationship between comments per day, ie. the rate at which you comment as opposed to your full comment count, and combined author + curation rewards.

Conclusion

There is a relationship between every factor discussed here (Hive Power, Account Age and Post Count), and every form of reward. Some relationships are stronger than others, and while post count seems to contribute to your author rewards, your overall Hive Power probably contributes more, whether you have earned that through posting or by buying it. The strongest and clearest relationship overall is that of Hive Power and curation rewards, yet it is still possible for a few low HP accounts to obtain substantial curation rewards.