I measured 24 hours of all of Reddit, both halves. The typical NSFW post earns exactly as much as the typical mainstream one — the difference is the c

Last time I did a post like this, the NSFW half was left out and half the thread asked for it. So here is the whole site, both halves, one full day. and two things this forum repeats constantly turn out to be the opposite of what the data says.




The window: Saturday 5 September 15:00 UTC → Sunday 6 September 15:00 UTC. A full 24 hours, every public subreddit, both halves.

0. How to read this​

• Every post made in those 24 hours is in every number below. Nothing is sampled, and nothing is thrown out for being quiet. Both halves are measured over the same day, and every post had been up between 17 and 41 hours when its score was counted.
• Scores were counted at a single moment — 7 September, 09:00 UTC. A post from this window keeps earning for days, so every upvote figure here is a reading at that moment, not a final number. Ratios between the two halves barely move; absolute totals keep climbing.
• "Upvotes" means the score Reddit shows — upvotes minus downvotes. Reddit publishes that plus an upvote ratio, and fuzzes both slightly to frustrate vote manipulation — so a single post's number is close, not exact.
• Where I rank flairs or subreddits by score, I rank on the middle post, never the average, and a row needs a minimum number of posts before it gets plotted. Section 9 shows you exactly why, using this same day. If you read nothing else, read that one.
• Still not selling anything.
• This post was written by me, and I gave it to AI to make it well organized. all data was counted and fetched by me and I gave the data to claude to organize it.
  
  
  
  

1. The headline
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• 1,144,442 posts in 24 hours — 795 a minute, 13.2 every second.
• 45.2% of them are NSFW — 516,789 posts. Nearly half of everything posted on Reddit in a day is adult.
• 503,543 accounts posted. 142,543 of them posted NSFW.
• 95,881 subreddits got a post — 68,329 mainstream-only, 25,424 NSFW-only, and 2,128 that took both.
• 44.6M upvotes, 8.93M comments, 8.96M shares landed on those posts. NSFW's share: 24.8% of the upvotes, 14.0% of the comments, 37.5% of the shares — it gets shared far more than it gets talked about.
• 622,892 removals seen during the window. That counts every removal that happened inside the day, including of older posts, so it is not a death rate. The death rate is in section 7.

​

2. NSFW posts do not earn half — that is an artefact of using averages​

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02-median.png



The number everybody quotes is the average, and the average says mainstream earns two and a half times as much: 53.5 against 21.4. That number is useless. An average is one figure being dragged around by a handful of monsters.

Here is the same day at every rung of the ladder, all 1,144,442 posts, nothing excluded:



The typical NSFW post and the typical mainstream post earn exactly the same: 2 upvotes. And they stay level far longer than that single row suggests — from the 15th rung to the 45th both halves sit on 1, and they tie again at the median. Mainstream only pulls clear from the 55th rung upward, and its lead widens the whole way to the top: 167 against 71 at the 95th, and a best post of 108,268 against 18,341.

You can see the same thing from the other direction: 49.7% of all mainstream upvotes were earned by posts that broke 1,000, against 24.7% on the NSFW side. Mainstream Reddit is a lottery with bigger jackpots. NSFW is a wage.

Two things worth killing here, because both get repeated constantly:

• Neither half "flops" more than the other. 45.9% of mainstream posts and 48.0% of NSFW posts finish on zero or one upvote. It is close to a coin flip on both sides of the site.
• Where they genuinely differ at the bottom is zeros. Mainstream leaves 10.4% of its posts on exactly zero; NSFW leaves 4.5%. NSFW parks 43.5% on exactly one, against mainstream's 35.5%. Almost nothing on the NSFW side gets actively buried — it just sits at one and stops.

The gap that is large and real: comments. An NSFW post finishes with no comments at all 44.8% of the time, against 30.8% for mainstream. People look; they don't talk.

3. NSFW owns the small hours

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Mainstream swings 1.95× across the day — 18.3K posts at its 06:00 UTC low, 35.7K at its 16:00 peak. NSFW barely moves: 17.0K at 09:00 to 25.1K at 20:00, a 1.47× swing.

So overnight, NSFW is the majority of everything posted on Reddit — five straight hours from 03:00 to 07:00 UTC, peaking at 52.2%.

4. What each half posts, with video counted properly​

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04-types.png





Reddit labels moving images four different ways, and any count that collapses them into one bucket buries the entire NSFW video population inside the "link" row — which is how the "NSFW barely posts video" idea got started. Kept separate:



What those three video rows mean:

• Reddit's player — the clip was uploaded to Reddit.
• Rehosted off-site — the clip lives on another site, but it plays inside Reddit. The viewer watches it without going anywhere.
• Embedded — the clip lives on another site and the viewer has to go there to watch it.
  
  

On the surface, all three are "a video from somewhere else". Only one of them sends the viewer away, and that is the one that dies. Which is why they are three rows here and one row in every other breakdown you have read.

NSFW posts more moving image than mainstream does — 11.6% against 7.7%. The two halves just host it in completely different places. Mainstream uses Reddit's own player and YouTube embeds. NSFW rehosts off-site, overwhelmingly to RedGIFs — 99.9% of that row is a single destination. Fold those clips back into "link" the way a naive count does and the NSFW link row jumps from 3.4% to 13.3%, which is exactly how the video disappears.



### That 30.2% text row is a trap, and it is the same trap as section 9

Read it as "NSFW subs post a lot of text" and you will be badly wrong. It is two unrelated businesses averaged into one number.

Go sub by sub instead of pooling. Across the 3,103 NSFW subreddits that posted at least 30 times that day — between them 74.9% of all NSFW posts:


(The five rows come to 74.9%, not 100% — the remaining quarter of NSFW posts is spread across thousands of subs too small for the table.)



The median NSFW subreddit is 6.5% text. Nearly half of them — 47.6% — are under 5%. r/GOONED, the biggest NSFW sub on the site by audience, posted 2,349 times in this window: 1,109 galleries, 582 rehosted clips, 554 images, 86 gifs, 9 embeds, 9 links, and zero text posts.

What lifts the pooled figure is the other end: about 234 contact boards — r4r, sexting rooms, confession subs — that run 80–100% text and post in enormous volume. r/dirtyr4r is 99.5% text. r/GOONEDmeetup is 99.9%. Those 234 subs are one NSFW post in seven, and nearly half of every NSFW text post on the site.

So NSFW Reddit is two businesses that barely overlap. The content half is pictures and clips. The contact half is text. If you are working the content side, treat the text row as roughly zero.

Two other things that bite:

• "Text" is not text even where it appears. Nearly 4 in 10 NSFW text posts have no body at all — a title and nothing else, median 3 words, against 44 words for a mainstream text post. It is one-line contact ads, which is exactly what you would expect given where the text lives.
• A gallery is small. Median 3 images on the mainstream side, 2 on the NSFW side. The cap is 20 on both.

5. What actually earns: format beats volume
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05-earns.png




Everything above counts posts. This counts upvotes against them, which is a completely different ranking.

Mainstream

NSFW


On the NSFW side, rehosted clips are 1 post in 10 and 4 upvotes in 10. Median 12 upvotes against 2 for an image and 1 for a text post. That is the biggest single lever in this report and it costs nothing but a format change — and it works for the reason in section 4: the clip plays where the person already is.

The mirror image is text: 30.2% of NSFW posts, 3.3% of NSFW upvotes. A third of the effort for a thirtieth of the score. Same on the mainstream side — 41.7% of posts, 7.2% of upvotes.

Worst buy on the site: polls. 0.2% of mainstream posts and 0.02% of the upvotes. Among formats that actually carry media, the weakest is the YouTube embed — 2.3% of posts for 0.5% of upvotes, median score 1. Reddit does not reward sending people to YouTube.

6. You cannot send anyone off-site from the NSFW half​

06-outbound.png



This is the most actionable number here.

Count every post pointing at a host that is neither Reddit nor RedGIFs:

• Mainstream: 6.70% — 42,047 posts.
• NSFW: 0.41% — 2,099 posts.

A 16.5× gap. Seven in a hundred mainstream posts send someone somewhere else. On the NSFW side it is four in a thousand, across the entire half of the site, in a full day. The single biggest outbound destination on the whole NSFW side was YouTube, at 250 posts — the runner-up managed 192.

For comparison, mainstream's top destinations are YouTube (14,620), a job board (2,161), then the news sites.

RedGIFs carried 52,104 NSFW posts that day, but that is where the NSFW half hosts its media — it isn't a place anyone is being sent, which is why it is out of the count on both sides. Strip it and the outbound traffic business on NSFW Reddit essentially does not exist.

7. Twice the death rate — but not from the moderators​

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07-removals.png



Every post given an identical 6-hour window (474,748 mainstream, 400,653 NSFW):

• Mainstream: 13.89% gone — 65,942 posts.
• NSFW: 27.43% gone — 109,899 posts.
  
  

Almost exactly double — 1.97×, and it holds. But the interesting part is who did it, as a share of all posts on that side:

NSFW moderators remove less than mainstream moderators do — 2.5% against 3.7%. The gap comes from the other two directions: authors deleting their own posts at 1.99× the rate, and Reddit's own filter at 5.69×.

Read the author-deletion number as workflow, not regret: much of the NSFW half is contact boards where posting an ad, connecting, and deleting the ad is the entire point.

Copyright takedowns are a rounding error: 38 of the day's posts, and 65 takedowns carried out during the day across posts of every age.

8. who posts NSFW
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08-accounts.png



142,543 NSFW posters against 361,000 who posted only mainstream. A profile had been read for 94% of the NSFW side and 97% of the mainstream side, so the figures below are not an artefact of thin data.

• Median karma 203 against 823 — a 4× gap.
• 50.7% are under a year old, against 26.1%. 15.2% are under 30 days, against 6.9%.
• 97.6% of NSFW posters have their own profile marked NSFW — as do 18.0% of mainstream-only posters.
• 3.79 posts per account against 1.67. Only 41.8% posted once and stopped, against 72.9%.
• 1.46% had stopped resolving by the end of the window against 0.34% — 4.4× as often. That covers bans, deletions and self-deletes alike; read it as a disappearance rate.
• The top 1,000 accounts produced 14.6% of all NSFW posts, against 8.7% on the mainstream side. The widest-spraying account that isn't Reddit's own bot posted 468 times across 367 different subreddits.

9. Why most "best flair" charts are worthless​

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09-trap.png


This is the section I'd most like people to steal.

Take the day's posts, group them by flair, rank by average score, set no minimum. Here is the top of that list:

The top row is one post. So are four of the top ten. Publish that and someone builds a posting strategy around an emoji flair that a single person used once. The sharpest example is a little further down: "Intriguing", 5 posts, average 11,389 — and one of those five posts is 99.4% of the entire flair's score.

That is not an edge case, it is the normal shape of flair data. There were 56,142 distinct mainstream flairs in this one day. 28,846 of them — more than half — have exactly one post. Only 43 clear 500 posts.

So: same data, minimum 500 posts, ranked on the middle post instead of the average:


That one you can act on. Every score ranking in this post uses those rules, and where a row falls under the minimum I print its count and don't plot it.

The same trap sits in subreddit rankings. r/BotBouncer posted 4,857 times that day, which puts it third busiest on the whole site — from two accounts. It's a reporting feed, not a community. That single feed also carries 2,907 NSFW-flagged posts, which is a useful reminder that "NSFW post" is a flag on a post, not a statement about the subreddit it sits in. That's why there's an account count next to every subreddit row in section 10.

10. The NSFW universe
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10-universe.png

• 53,260 NSFW subreddits with a live weekly audience, out of 281,889 — about 1 in 5. New NSFW subreddits surface constantly, so this figure only moves one way.
• 1,345 of them have 100k+ weekly actives, out of 5,543 subs that size on the whole site — about 1 in 4.
• Combined weekly active seats: 667 million, 22.7% of Reddit's 2.94 billion. A person counts once per subreddit, so these are seats and not people.
• Busiest NSFW sub of the day: 8,750 posts from 4,411 accounts.
• Standing figures, not part of the measured day: about 4.75 million subreddits have existed at some point, 281,889 have a live audience right now, and only 194,875 saw a post in the last seven days.

11. Almost nothing gets almost everything

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11-concentration.png



Three ways of asking the same question.

By post — share of all upvotes taken by the best posts:

The bottom half of Reddit, both halves, splits under 3% of the upvotes between them.

By account — how many posts people made on that side of the site that day:

2,583 accounts — 1.8% of everyone who posted NSFW — put up 22.5% of every NSFW post that day. The equivalent mainstream group is 754 accounts and 7.9%. You are not competing with a crowd on the NSFW side, you are competing with a small industrial group.

By subreddit — the top 1,000 NSFW subs carry 56.1% of all NSFW posts. Mainstream's top 1,000 carry 34.2%. And posts land where the audience is, not where it is biggest: subs with 10K–100K weekly actives took 260,381 NSFW posts, more than the 100K+ and under-1K tiers put together.

12. What I'd take from this​

• Stop repeating that NSFW earns less per post. At the median it earns the same. What it lacks is the top end — there is no 90K-upvote NSFW post.
• It's a wage, not a lottery. Same floor, a sixth of the ceiling. If you need reliable small numbers, that's the trade.
• Don't build on comments. Nearly half of all NSFW posts finish with no comment at all.
• Don't build on outbound traffic either. Four posts in a thousand link out. The format fights you and so does the audience.
• Aged accounts matter less than this forum thinks. The median NSFW poster has 203 karma and half the side is under a year old.
• The mods are not your problem — Reddit's filter is. NSFW mods remove less than mainstream mods. Reddit's own filter removes nearly six times more.
• Post whenever. NSFW has no dead hour, and overnight it is the majority of the entire site.
• Change format before you change anything else. Rehosted clips are 10% of NSFW posts and 40% of NSFW upvotes. Nothing else in this report moves the needle that far.
• Pick which half of NSFW you are in. Content subs are pictures and clips and post almost no text. Contact boards are almost entirely text. Strategy that works in one is dead in the other.

Ask whatever you want in the thread. If you want a specific subreddit or niche broken down, name it and I'll run it.

Breakdown cards — 30 subreddits, 50 accounts

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Window: Saturday 5 September 15:00 UTC → Sunday 6 September 15:00 UTC. Upvote counts are a reading taken 7 September 09:00 UTC — the same reading used everywhere in the post.

Each card covers one subreddit or one account across that single day: how much it posted and when, what it posted, what each format earned, how much of it disappeared inside six hours and who removed it.

How the 80 were chosen:​

• Subreddits — per side, the 10 that took the most posts that day (at least 50 different accounts posting, so a feed run by two accounts can't take a slot) plus the 5 that earned the most upvotes. A subreddit's side is its own adult flag.
• Accounts — per side, the 12 that posted the most plus the 13 that earned the most upvotes. An account counts as NSFW if any of its posts that day carried the adult flag, which is why r/AutoModerator sits on that side.
• Under 30 posts, a middle score is printed and not ranked — the same rule the post uses in section 9. Those tiles are greyed.

Subreddits​

Accounts​

Authors:

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Authors:

This is some fabulous data. Loved the first batch and this is really interesting too, going to take me some time to digest/compare. Thanks for sharing

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Subreddits:

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Thanks for your work. Redgifs count as rehosted clips?