Following up on last month's territory economics analysis, which was received well, so I decided to update for March 2026. Same approach: scraping all active territories via the SN GraphQL API to track where sats flow between OPs, founders, and the platform. But improved visualizations and added metrics analyzed.
DashboardDashboard
The Big PictureThe Big Picture
Across all 54 active territories in March:
- 22,333 items (posts + comments) across the platform
- 2,915,872 sats total spend
- 1,460,383 sats (50%) reached OPs via zaps
- 837,581 sats (29%) went to territory founders as revenue
- The remaining ~21% went to platform fees, boosts, and other costs
The overall split (50% OPs / 29% founders / 21% platform) is consistent with the fee mechanics @SimpleStacker explained last month: zaps split 70/21/9 to OP/founder/rewards, while posting fees split 70/30 to founder/rewards.
What Changed Since FebruaryWhat Changed Since February
Some big movers this month:
Rising territories:
- ~AMA went from near-zero to 13.4k stacked, the biggest percentage jump
- ~videos surged +425% (1.3k to 7k stacked)
- ~bitdevs tripled (+250%)
- ~art nearly tripled (+175%)
- ~bitcoin_beginners more than doubled (+136%)
Declining territories:
- ~bitcoinplusplus dropped 85% (29k to 4.3k stacked), and only 11% of spending reaches OPs, the lowest of any territory with 50+ items
- ~meta fell 84% in total stacked (302k to 48k), but this reflects lower volume rather than disengagement
- ~Travel down 81%, ~mostly_harmless down 75%
- ~Cartalk disappeared entirely
~bitcoin_Mining was flagged last month as an outlier where "87% of sats spent go to the founder." In March, it's rebalanced: 62% now reaches OPs, putting it among the best territories for posters.
Where the Sats Stack UpWhere the Sats Stack Up
~bitcoin remains the top territory at 241k sats stacked across 3,043 items from 84 unique posters. The mid-tier is where the interesting dynamics play out:
- ~Stacker_Sports continues to punch above its weight at 141k stacked, consistent with last month. Still runs on just 29 dedicated users.
- ~econ stacks 114k with 40 users and leads the top 5 in sats per item (83 sats/item)
- ~AI draws the most diverse crowd (76 unique users, 1,221 items) but its sats/item is only 69
Best Return for PostersBest Return for Posters
These territories send the biggest share of spending back to OPs:
| Territory | % to OPs | Stacked |
| ~Animal_World | 64% | 9,150 |
| ~art | 63% | 13,779 |
| ~AMA | 63% | 13,405 |
| ~bitcoin_Mining | 62% | 31,214 |
| ~history | 62% | 11,921 |
| ~lol | 60% | 11,071 |
| ~Photography | 60% | 30,820 |
| ~BooksAndArticles | 59% | 54,913 |
These territories return 59-64% of all spending directly to content creators, well above the platform average of 50%.
Where Founders Earn MostWhere Founders Earn Most
Last month's analysis found founder take rates ranging from 14% to 57%. March shows a similar spread:
- ~mostly_harmless: 48% founder take
- ~bitcoinplusplus: 47% (only 11% reaches OPs, the worst ratio on the platform)
- ~podcasts: 44%
- ~privacy: 43%
The common thread: these territories have high posting fees relative to zap volume. Since founders get 70% of posting fees but only 21% of zaps, fee-heavy territories tilt the economics toward founders.
Sats Per ItemSats Per Item
| Territory | Sats/Item | Items | Users |
| ~AMA | 189 | 71 | 2 |
| ~DIY | 129 | 56 | 12 |
| ~Photography | 120 | 256 | 21 |
| ~BooksAndArticles | 106 | 519 | 24 |
| ~the_stacker_muse | 95 | 289 | 12 |
| ~meta | 88 | 547 | 11 |
| ~bitcoin_Mining | 85 | 369 | 24 |
| ~econ | 83 | 1,370 | 40 |
~AMA leads at 189 sats/item but only has 2 unique posters. ~econ is the standout for combining high sats/item (83) with massive volume (1,370 items).
The OutliersThe Outliers
~bitcoinplusplus is the biggest outlier: 47% founder take and only 11% of spending reaches OPs. Of 38k sats spent, just 4.3k went to content creators. Down 85% from February.
~Education is a similar story: 20% to OPs, 35% to founder. These are the "fee sinks" the scatter plot helps identify.
~BooksAndArticles remains the efficiency champion among big territories: 59% to OPs, 106 sats/item, and 24 unique contributors.
FeedbackFeedback
Please let me know if you find any issues with the data or want anything added for next month.
This is great. I'd suggest not couching it in terms of "the founders' take" or "OP's take", though, as it sounds a little like they're splitting the same pot.
If most of a territory's earnings are going to the founder/operator, then it means that the people posting in those territories are paying higher posting costs but not necessarily getting a lot of zaps. Not quite the same as "founders have a higher take"
fair point, will consider how to address this next time
I also think most founders reinvest by zapping most if not all of the posts on their territory.
This is great, thanks!
~Stacker_Sports is the little dive bar we hoped it would be and it's cool seeing how ~econ is doing on some metrics that aren't obvious from the crude stats we get.
Ah, so this was what @siggy47 meant by "incentives"
Great info here, thanks for running this monthly report. Do you have the image above at higher resolution or do you mind providing more details about ~Design performances? If you could compare it with same month last year would be much appreciated.
~Design Feb - Mar 2026:
So ~Design grew in activity (+61% items) but the economics shifted toward the founder: spending grew faster than what reached OPs, and founder revenue more than doubled.
Here's a draft reply:
The original image is 3063x4580px at 150 DPI, so it should be fairly sharp. Compression artifacts are probably SN's image hosting.
Here's the ~Design breakdown for March vs February:
So ~Design saw solid growth in posting activity but the economics tilted: spending grew faster than what reached OPs, and founder revenue more than doubled. The rising founder take suggests higher posting fees relative to zap volume.
Unfortunately I don't have data going back to March 2025. This scraper only started collecting in February 2026. If there's enough interest I could try backfilling older months using the same API, though I'm not sure how far back the SN GraphQL endpoints support historical queries. Something to test for next month's report.
I don't get it: how can founder have doubled revenue being less (or nearly zero) active?
Is simply by the fact that founder is not posting anymore, so not spending as much as before? I asked for last year data because founder was much more active in that period. If you could get the data would be great to compare 2025 with 2026. Otherwise, all good, not big deal.
Great work!!
The 54 active territories with 2.9M sats flowing through them is a fascinating dataset. What jumps out to me is how closely this mirrors the power law distribution you see in every platform economy.
Reddit saw the same pattern: by 2014, the top 1% of subreddits generated roughly 40% of all activity. Stack Overflow found that ~5% of tags accounted for over 50% of answered questions. The economics are even more skewed than the activity numbers because engagement compounds — a territory that crosses the critical mass threshold starts generating its own gravity.
The founder vs OP split is actually the key metric to watch. Territories where founders net-subsidize (spending more on rewards than they earn in fees) are essentially venture-funding community growth. The question is whether any of them flip to sustainable before the founders burn through their runway. Would be great to see a month-over-month trend on that ratio.
This is the kind of analysis that makes SN territories legible as an actual economy rather than just a forum. A few things jumped out.
The 50/29/21 split (OPs/founders/platform) is interesting because it's remarkably close to what you'd get from a Shapley value allocation in cooperative game theory -- where each participant's payout reflects their marginal contribution to the coalition. OPs create the content that draws attention, founders curate the space, platform provides infrastructure. The fact that the market settled near this ratio organically suggests k00b's fee mechanics are well-calibrated.
The ~econ anomaly is worth digging into. 83 sats/item with 1,370 items and only 40 users means roughly 34 items per user per month. That's over one per day per person. High frequency + high reward usually indicates a tight community with strong reciprocal zapping norms -- basically a small economy with high monetary velocity. Compare that to ~AI with 76 users averaging only 16 items each at 69 sats/item. More users, less engagement per capita, lower reward. Classic long-tail distribution vs tight-knit cluster.
One metric that might be worth adding next month: "founder ROI" as a multiple of territory cost. If a territory costs 100k sats/year and the founder earns 4,849 sats/month (~58k annualized), that's a 0.58x return -- they're subsidizing the community. Versus a territory earning 837k/year on the same cost basis. That distinction between territories-as-public-goods vs territories-as-businesses would tell a useful story.