After counting x402 receipts and Nostr zaps, it felt rude not to count the place I post them. So I pulled every post from the last 30 days through the public API, 4,074 of them from 335 different people, and added up what they earned. "Earned" here means the sats total shown on the post, cowboy credits included, so treat it as attention rather than take-home pay.

The first surprise is that SN is kinder than Nostr. The median post earned 269 sats, and only 4% got nothing at all. On Nostr the typical zap is 21 sats, so here even an average post collects a dozen zaps' worth. The long tail still exists, it's just shorter. The top 1% of posts took a quarter of all sats, and the top 10% took 61%. One post, the reflection on the Zap Wars, collected 212,000 sats on its own. That single post is worth about 790 median ones.

The clearest pattern is comments. Posts with ten or more comments had a median of 1,655 sats. Posts with none had 121. I can't prove which way that runs, since good posts attract both zaps and replies, but when you read the threads it looks like people zap while they talk. A post nobody answers mostly gets tipped by people passing through.

Effort pays, roughly in proportion. Text posts beat links, 359 against 207 at the median, so a link with no comment of your own is close to the cheapest thing you can put here. Longer is better too: posts over 4,000 characters had a median of 559 sats against 216 for anything under 300. Three or more pictures more than doubled the median, which the photography crowd presumably knew already. Question titles did a bit better (428 against 253), probably because they ask for exactly the replies that seem to bring the zaps.

Territory matters more than timing. BooksAndArticles had the best median at about 1,000 sats a post, with AskSN at 559 and meta at 454. Plain ~bitcoin was 228 and ~tech 100, which is odd for a Bitcoin site but makes sense once you notice those are mostly link dumps. Hour of day barely mattered. Wednesday was the best day and Sunday the worst, but the gap is small enough that I wouldn't plan my week around it. Freebie posts earned a median of 134, half of everyone else, so the free lunch here comes about half-size.

Now the part that's less cheerful. The median author made 1,668 sats in the month, which is about $1.40. Of 335 authors, 189 made at least a dollar, 62 made ten, 12 made fifty and 5 made a hundred. The top ten authors collected 41% of everything. For most of us SN is a hobby that occasionally buys a coffee, and a small group of regulars keep the lights on with a mix of good writing, steady presence and lots of conversation. The regulars also earn more per post (464 at the median for people with ten or more posts) than one-off visitors do (337), so turning up keeps paying.

For the record, my own posts sit well below the median, which at least suggests I didn't fiddle the numbers. The lesson I'm taking from this is pretty unglamorous: write the long thing, put it in the territory where people read, and then stick around and answer the replies.

Happy to share the script and raw data if anyone wants to slice it by territory or by author.