I ran an analysis on the numbers that I have (views, likes and earnings) for quite a large number of my past blog posts (115, to be exact), mainly for the sake of my own interest. I was going to punch in figures for the previous one hundred and fifty (150) to get a hopefully sufficient spread. However, I ran out of motivation before I ran out of time. (It's all very depressing, even if I do get onto a good streak and eventually amass a larger following to the point where I'm earning at least a dollar a post. I'm still far from that point, after more than a couple of years.) A number of things were apparent from the data, by that stage of gathering it:
- Some of my posts far outperformed the bad or average ones, in terms of actual vs typical income. Even then, its in the tens of cents at best, so nothing substantial.
- Some of my posts performed so poorly that I shouldn't have even bothered writing and posting them.
- Even with the successful posts, I'm not making massive gains that far outweigh the duds, since my average earning is so low (much worse than I estimated/expected). I win some and I lose some, despite the fact that I succeed slightly more than I bomb.
- I should look for a platform that pays me primarily for number of views across all posts (at least $0.01 per hundred) and promotes/recommends my all-time top ten to twenty higher-earning/more popular ones, in addition to allowing users to leave tips. Anything less is a waste of my time and energy for earnings.
- The data tells me which posts do well, but not why. It's too random/subjective to discern a winning formula or pattern. Perhaps, if I built a tag cloud to show the relative frequency of tags on successful posts vs failed ones, I might get some useful insight.
- Doing a lexical analysis of tone and style might offer some insight, but would more likely be a waste of effort. Ditto factoring in reading length. More data points might prove helpful in seeing a trend, but I suspect I'd just get analysis paralysis.
- Despite what I thought, my SJW posts don't categorically perform badly. There are a couple of outliers that buck the trend.
- Ultimately, the of it seems to come down to subjective human factors that are difficult to quantify and achieve consistently anyway. I already know what those are. AI probably can't tell me (and, TBH, I don't want to know what the result will be if it can).
- If the majority of tips to me weren't in SPOT, which is useless to me, I'd have more than enough to withdraw AMPL and ETH this month. As is, I'll have to post more (and risk receiving yet more damn SPOT) to be able to do that.
- Ultimately, fiat farming and stashing the income is the only way for me to acquire crypto. Writing prose isn't going to earn me anything substantial; it just ain't doing it for me. Do you see why I found the results depressing?
"The Matrix can't tell you who you are."
Now, I could give you a list of my best posts (ones that performed better than average), but I can't figure out how to easily get a table into pub0x's editor without some sort of CSV transformation and running it through . Also, the inline link editor isn't working for me. Besides, I put together a writing index a while ago, for the posts that were popular at the time. It'll be easier to link that and dump some screenshots of my spreadsheet. That's the option I've chosen. I hope it both gives you some further reading while I'm job hunting and lets you know which posts could do with a boost. Sadly, Pub0x restricts individuals to a maximum of two tips per post, so I suggest the ones that fall 1 or 2 cents below average. The others are probably irredeemable, unless I should post my wallet addresses (but I've found that approach to be ineffective in the past).
You might need to click on the images to zoom in, if the text is too small to read. We really need to be able to insert and format tables ... This is one of the reasons why I don't like WYSIWYG editors that don't support HTML and/or Markdown code editing modes.
Some of those differences (like -$0.35) are just embarrassing, but not anything to get excited about in the grand scheme of things, being less than even $1.00. Maybe I can recoup some of the cost by republishing some of the better-performing posts on Mirror.
Thumbnail image: Photo by Lukas on Pexels
