How Unequal is the Online Writing Economy?

Short answer: yes.

Since January 2023, the articles published in The Pub received 605,200 views.

It looks like this:

Grandma made dis

Three things:

• Someone hit the jackpot in March 2023.
• A few people hit the mini-jackpot in July 2024.
• Overall, the average is pretty stable around 23,000 views excluding outliers.

These numbers include external views.

During the same period, the articles published in The Pub got 348,800 reads with an average read ratio of 57.6%.

It looks like this:

Grandma also made dis

Three things:

• I manipulated the scale to make the chart look more dramatic.
• The variability surprised me. 41% read ratio in June VS. 67% in July. I guess it’s explained by “viral” articles (more on that below).
• The 2023 average read ratio was 60.3% and 53.0% in 2024. It seems to be a significant decrease…