The territories will not be profitable on territory revenue alone. At least not any time soon.

What I am trying to quantify is the value add of having the territory and the territories in general incentivizing greater activity across SN to my own daily earnings from zaps and rewards.

I will wait until the end of the month but then I am going to do a post that will show the revenue I earned from the territory plus the zaps/rewards I earned compared to the pre-territory era. Did the increased activity in the territory, and more broadly on SN earn me enough additional zaps/rewards to make up for the loss on the territory fee?

Not that it really matters to me. It would be nice to break even but if I don't that's ok too. I am just trying to formulate a picture of the impact of territories. Hopefully we will get some data out of SN as well to see if they have increased users and activity.

I expect most territories to fail or to be passion projects financed at a loss by the founders. We are in the territory boom phase right now but I expect we will see great attrition over the next couple months as territories drop off or merge (maybe it's not viable to have individual art, music, and movie territories and they meld into one. Maybe AI and tech become one. Health and Fitness become one. Etc).

Ultimately, I think the territories will be a huge benefit to SN long term. I wouldn't have pestered @k00b for months about a sports sub if I didn't believe breadth of conversation would be a net benefit to the site. That being said we are going to have a messy few months to coalesce probably around 10-12 (guess) viable territories. In the meantime, let's get some more bitcoiners on the platform. Right now I haven't even begun to try to attract non bitcoiners when most bitcoiners aren't even on here. Let's get the low hanging fruit and then broaden our horizons.

That's my 2 sats.

@k00b I had an idea... Would we be able to assign "moderators" to territories. This was we could split the fees say 5 ways for a team of 5 mods. Making it much more palatable for some. Their job would obviously be to "moderate" that space. That could pose a solution. With the rewards from territories being spit within moderators (ideally automated by SN, but if trust based to start then so be it)

Yes it could be. I think the author should also be cut into reply costs though.

No not really. If the fiat price of bitcoin increases, every sat you earn will also go up in fiat price.

In the future we plan to allow territory founders to sell sub-territories within their territory which can be sold at a price of their choosing, eg 10k/mo. At that point 100k/mo is just the price for a top-level territory.

I created a poll about doing a fundraiser within the territory. So far the response has been in favour of that being an OK move to make. There's been some opposition with valid concerns. I think it'll be up to each individual territory owner to manage how they feel is appropriate. But I hadn't intended on becoming a "ruler of a kingdom" only it's initial patron. It's still early. We shall see how it all shakes out.

I'm also curious what happens to a territory if someone decides to stop paying the monthly fee. Does that territory get claimed by SN? Does it go up for grabs for someone else to purchase? At 10sats/post and 50% rev share, territories need to have 20K posts per month to make up a 100K/month cost, so I suspect a lot of these early territories are going to freeze up once the initial sponsor runs low on sats. Would be really interesting if we had public charts on the performance of territories (I'm sure SN internally can query and get charts of that) but that might help folks see if a territory is underfunded by activity and in need of user donations to keep it rolling (or if the territory sponsor has said that they are willing to consume the loss)

I love the 1 sat per reply, don't make them take that away