We have seen garbage posts on Publish0x receiving hundreds of tips within one day worth of several dollars, while we have seen great informative posts receiving just a few tips worth of a few cents in months. And we wondered: 'Why is that?' Is it about the author? Is is about the timing? Is it about the subject? So we decided to run an experiment to confirm the suspicions we have - that we are not going to reveal for now.

Is it about the authors?

We have researched posts from several authors - some of them having written 'most tipped posts' for a day, or a week, or a month. There is no consistency. From the articles we researched, none of the most tipped authors had two most popular articles. Some authors may have developed some kind of an audience, but with the retention rate attributed to the platform, it is evident that even the largest followership shall degrade over time.

Is it about the length of the content?

Again, there is no correlation on the length of a post. 3-minute reads and 4-minute reads are rare anyway, but even if they were promoted by the platform as such, they are not producing views, nor tips.

Is it about timing?

In this, we can only tell from posts we publish on the platform. Although we have seen some authors claiming to have found the perfect timing, there is no evidence that timing plays a role. Most of our posts in this blog were published in certain time slots (e.g. around noon, or around midnight GMT). While for some time articles published around midnight GMT were performing decently (around 300-400 views), latest posts published at that time are barely getting 80 views in the first 24 hours.

So, what is this experiment about?

This experiment is about reader interaction. If you have gotten this far, please like or dislike this post. Write a comment too if you wish, but you have to like or dislike. Tipping is always welcome, but for the purpose of this experiment doesn't offer any information, as authors can only see amount of tips received, not the number of tips. This will help us get an overview of the rate of real user interaction, compared to blind tipping.

Time of post going live: 02:35 GMT.