It's time to talk territories and to look at how they've been performing since going-live in December 2023. Recently I have been reviewing post data on SN to try and encourage more long-form content.

Below are 21 charts that you might find useful. For the first few charts, we'll look at just the top stacker-led territories, to examine number of sats, comments, comment sats & total zaps.

Few things to note:

Of the new territories since they went live 5th December, we can view the number of sats from >1k sat posts cumulatively generated for each territory. ~lightning, ~econ & ~booksandarticles are in a league of their own.

Note: along the x-axis are weeks since the new territories became live. e.g. week 1 corresponds to w/c 4th December.

Number of comments total from >1k sat posts cumulatively shown per territory since 5th December. ~econ & ~booksandarticles are in orbit already!

For new territories, the number of sats from comments for the best performing territories on this metric. Again ~booksandarticles & ~econ way ahead, with ~culture doing great early-on before getting archived. It's back now though!

The number of stackers that zapped a >1k sat post inside each territory. Familiar theme here, ~booksandarticles, ~econ & ~lightning the top 3. ~charts is about to pip ~privacy to 4th spot.

Total sats earned by founders of that territory can be shown as a percentage of the total sats, on >1k sat posts. This is perhaps suggesting ~devs, ~privacy, ~oracle, ~stacker_sports & ~earth could encourage more stacker involvement.

👆 This chart is pretty crazy. ~bitcoin & ~meta may be untouchable for total sats and were therefore excluded from the graphic. But ~nostr & ~tech have been overtaken by most of these new territories now. The best territories overtook them in Week 8 and the chasing pack in Week 14, when MSM went live. ~ecash in its short history had some great traction and would have appeared, but has since been archived. Might be a great candidate for a passionate stacker to pick-up, if you can match the passion of the prior founder.

Tracking back to 5th December (Week 1), you can see that by Week 12, total sats from new territories overtook the total sats for core territories like ~bitcoin, ~meta, ~tech, ~nostr. This is a pretty big deal. It shows @kr was right all along and that territories have been a resounding success for the stacker community.

After tracking the core territories for weeks, in Week 16 there were more comments on new territories than the core ones (at least on posts with >1k sats).

Zaps for the new territories are still slightly behind the core territories, but the numbers are much more stable, with more shallow peaks & troughs.

Besides Week 12-14, sats from comments are tracking each other pretty nicely. Not much difference at all between new & core territories.

If there was ever any doubt whether territories were good for Stacker News - this chart for total number of posts achieving 1k sats says it all... 🚀

And more and more stackers are feeling comfortable writing longer and more successful posts, with this chart showing total posts achieving 10k sats or more.

The number of stackers zapping posts is clearly on the up this quarter too. The new territories are taking-over the market dominance the monopoly of ~bitcoin territory had.

The sats generated per post is somewhat stable or stagnant on the whole, in spite of Bitcoin NGU technology doing its thing & satoshis becoming more valuable. Stacker News sats-per-post now becoming a stablecoin, pretty much 😅

No huge differences here between where you post your article. with between 16 and 24 people zapping each post. ~meta remains in a league of its own for number of stackers zapping each post.

Comments & engagement is also pretty stable this quarter, with ~meta and ~nostr having bigger quarters for number of comments per post than prior months.

Lastly, this shows the number of individual stackers posting to ~bitcoin is reducing, whilst other territories are rising rapidly. Again territories are well embedded in SN culture now, ready to propel it to new heights by this next cycle.

So why go to all this effort, when we can see the totals for Top Territories at any snapshot in time? The aim with this post was to dig a little deeper into territories that have taken-off naturally, those that are hidden-gems with traction & those territories that are still heavily supported by their founders at this time. To see how the landscape has changed over time. To see where it may be best to post. It was helpful when performing this analysis to see where there is signal on the site currently, especially after having muted a bunch of territories at launch. If you are like me, you might wish to reassess if you should unmute some.

Bonus reason: It was also useful for me when I saw a bunch of territories that were archived, to analyse which had a potential future to take on myself. This led me to secure ~culture which was heavily used from Week 1 of territory season. I also wanted to experiment with bringing higher-quality signal to the ~AI territory. More on both of those soon!

We're now 17 weeks since the launch of Territories as a SN feature, so the hope is we can reassess our muted territories, and give credit to those fostering a great community here on SN, since the initial flurry of new 'subs' created a big splash with the rowdy locals in the daily saloon.

🚩 refers to moderated territories 🟡 refers to core territories (not new) avg comms = avg comments per post (to save space in table)

FYI this post may be useful info for new territory founders: @runningbitcoin, @siggy47, @jeff, @PlebLab, @elvismercury, @ek, @kr, @grayruby, @TonyGiorgio, @benwehrman, @bitcoinplebdev, @niftynei, @boisechampion, @birdeye21, @nout, @mo, @Public_N_M_E, @Design_r, @MerryOscar, @MaxAWebster, @antic, @south_korea_ln, @DesertDave, @RDClark, @TNStacker, @TheWildHustle, @UCantDoThatDotNet, @hodlme, @BitcoinOutdoors, @joelaw, @OneOneSeven, @k00b, @Car, @lloyddunne, @globalmerchantio, @Book_It, @Bit_Chef, @frostdragon, @inverselarp