Can you make money running a territory?
In case you didn't know, you can pay to be the operator of a territory on Stacker News.
Founding a territory costs either 50k sats/month, 500k sats/year, or 3m sats as a one-time payment.
The reason you might consider doing such a thing is that
But how do you know if it's worth the risk? Luckily, SN gives us a lot of analytics and we can look at how the top 20 territories are doing.
While I don't think I can do justice to @davidw's excellent post about top territories, it is an inspiration for this post.
Territories that are profitable
Here is the first chart you might be interested in: revenue per territory (top 20 - log scale) for the first half of 2025:
Of course ~bitcoin dominates here, but it's not surprising, considering that most stackers are Bitcoiners and if there is one thing Bitcoiners like to talk about, it's Bitcoin.
But what is far more interesting is which of these territories are breaking even:
It looks like 7 territories are currently making more than it costs to keep them alive (the bar is a little lower if you pay per year, but for now let's just see how it works if we assume everybody pays by the month -- 300k sats over 6 months).
This is great news! Some stackers are really putting in the work and building sustainable communities around the topics that interest them. I'm curious what we can learn about their success.
More posts and comments tend to = more revenue (but it's not the only way)
So, let's look at how many posts and comments these territories had in the first half of 2025:
There is a fairly strong correlation between more posts and comments and more revenue. So, if you want to run a territory that makes money, you need people to post and comment on items in your territory.
But there are some interesting outliers: ~AMA and ~lightning have fairly low post and comment numbers, yet ~lightning generates the third highest revenue and ~AMA is seventh. There's clearly more to the story.
High or low posting and commenting fees aren't correlated with revenue
Territory operators have the ability to set the posting fee and commenting fee. So that's the next place we might look for clues to their success:
There's not really any correlation here. Many strong revenue-producing territories have low fees, others have higher fees.
As far as fees to comment go, ~HealthAndFitness and ~Music have much higher fees than the rest. While it doesn't seem to be hurting their revenue, they aren't generating more revenue than a number of territories with lower commenting fees.
A territory can be successful with high fees or low fees. It's not that important of a factor.1
Highly zapped posts and comments are not correlated with increased revenue
It seems like having posts that have been heavily zapped would be great for territory owners; however, here are the charts for zaps per post and zaps per comment (the average amount of zapped sats a post or comment collected, not the number of zaps):
There isn't any meaningful correlation between how many total sats posts and comments are getting zapped and territory revenue. This was a surprise to me. It seems that the number of posts or comments that are happening in a territory is a better indicator of revenue than how much those items are getting zapped.
But it's a little more nuanced. ~AMA, ~builders, and ~jobs all have less than 100 posts in the last 6 months, and yet they are among the top 20 revenue-producing territories. Clearly, a territory can produce serious revenue despite low post numbers.
I wondered if it had to do with engagement (comments per post): if territories that had a lot of comments on every post were more likely to have higher revenue:
But there's really not much correlation here either. Even though ~AMA stands out in this chart, other low post territories like ~jobs do not.
Fee and Boost revenue vs zap revenue
The ~lightning territory is particularly interesting: despite generating the third highest revenue, it has lower post numbers and comment numbers than many of the other territories. I decided to separate out revenue that comes from zaps vs revenue that comes from fees and boosts.2
Sadly, neither yielded a significant correlation. Here, I've converted it to the percent of revenue each territory makes from fees and boosts:
Almost all revenue in ~jobs comes from posting fees and boosts and the leading revenue territory (~bitcoin) also gets a fairly high percent (77%) of its revenue from fees and boosts, whereas the second highest revenue territory (~Stacker_Sports) gets a fairly low percent of its revenue from fees and boosts (18%).
I suspect that territories like ~lightning do well because (in addition to having a lot of posts) posts in such territories are more likely to receive boosts, but this is not something I was able to demonstrate. When I look at Top Posts by Boost it only shows boosts in June. Still, looking into attracting boosts may be a fruitful avenue for territory operators.
Dataset
The data I used mostly came from the top territories page.
Footnotes
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I couldn't get data on when posting fees and comment fees were changed, so I had to use whatever the current values for those things were. I believe there are some territories that have changed their fee structure quite a bit in the first half of 2025, so it's possible my conclusion is incorrect. ↩
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There must be something my methodology isn't quite capturing here. To get these numbers I took the total spent for each territory and subtracted the total zapped (zapped is the toal stacked/0.7 because stackers keep 70% of the zaps they earn), which gave me amount spent on things that are not zaps, like fees, boosts, downzaps, and poll votes. Territory owners get 70% of post fees and boost fees, so that's the number I used, but it was always slightly low when I added it back to revenue from zaps and compared to total revenue. ↩
Zaps are the soul of SNso whatever territory gets higher zaps on average becomes higher and that's a common. Territories that make more revenue through fees are lower.