stackerstats

Top Territories Q1+Q2 2025

Archived territories are definitely something interesting to look in to. It's hard to resist the siren call of making your own space, though...

Stacker Saloon

saloon

These were the stackers whose posts received the most comments each day the last week of June: 

![](https://m.stacker.news/99189)



I only looked at the top 20, ranked by revenue. 

~Stacker_Stocks is number 22, and ~Construction_and_Engineering is 41. They are great territories. I would have shown the charts for all the territories, but it gets very crowded. 

When @davidw did his analysis, he split territories into groups, perhaps that is a better way to do it.

~AMA certainly has the highest zaps per post and per comment. 

~lightning, not so much. At least 9 territories have higher total sats zapped per post than ~lightning, yet it's third in revenue. How do you explain this? Neither is ~lightning in the top 5 for number of posts or number of comments. 

~lightning has fewer posts than ~Politics_And_Law, but a higher average sats zapped per post, so your observation is backed up by that. But I'm not sure it's as clear as you say. Especially when it comes to territory revenue vs stacker revenue.

I'm not sure revenue sharing will really attract more/new authors. It seems to me that one of the best things territory owners can do to help their writers is aiding in content discovery and visibility. Your newsletter is a great example. Territories that help writers get seen can make a compelling case for being home for things the writers create.


Posts in ~meta are getting zapped more total sats than ~lightning, ~Stacker_Sports, and ~econ, and yet it has less revenue. 

I also don't think that's the full story: remember, territory owners only get 21% of zaps in their territory, they get 70% of fees and boosts. When you look at percent revenue from fees and boosts, about half the territories in the top 20 are making more than half their revenue from fees and boosts -- which don't have anything to do with zaps.

Good point. I should do this again with just data from Q2.

# Can you make money running a territory?

In case you didn't know, you can pay to be the operator of a [territory](https://stacker.news/faq#territories) on Stacker News.

> Founding a territory costs either [50k sats/month, 500k sats/year, or 3m sats as a one-time payment](https://stacker.news/faq#how-much-does-it-cost-to-found-a-territory).

The reason you might consider doing such a thing is that

> Territory founders [earn 70% of all posting and boost fees as well as 21% of all sats zapped within their territory](https://stacker.news/faq#do-i-earn-sats-from-territories).

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](https://stacker.news/items/486959), 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:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99133)

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:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99134)

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:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99136)
![](https://m.stacker.news/99135)

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:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99138)
![](https://m.stacker.news/99139)

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]

[^1]: 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.

# 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): 

![](https://m.stacker.news/99140)
![](https://m.stacker.news/99141)

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:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99142)

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]

[^2]: 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.

![](https://m.stacker.news/99145)
![](https://m.stacker.news/99144)

Sadly, neither yielded a significant correlation. Here, I've converted it to the percent of revenue each territory makes from fees and boosts:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99146)

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](https://stacker.news/top/posts/forever?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](https://stacker.news/top/territories/custom?from=1735106400000&to=1750913999999).

In the last week of June, posts with a "?" in the title had a higher total median sats-zapped:

![](https://m.stacker.news/99131)

I didn't use api. just copy-pasted every post from every day into a file and then parsed it for csv.

Last week of June: ratio of zapped posts to post that got 0 zaps.

![](https://m.stacker.news/99101)