Moving Up (or Down) in HubPages Ranking

September 8, 2010

I’ve been a member of Hubpages for about two weeks. Out of curiosity I decided to find out what my actual ranking was, in absolute numbers. We all know about the Hubber (or author) score, a ranking that goes from 100 all the way down to zero. This is not to be confused with the individual Hub score, which also goes from 100 to 0. Both of these scores fluctuate.

Anyway, on September 5th I went to the “Best Hubbers” page, in which all Hubbers are ranked. Each screen has 10 Hubbers, and the ranking goes from the highest Hubber score (100) to the lowest. I could not find a way to search for myself directly in this ranking, so I started to move through the pages, following the rankings down. At the highest Hubber score of 100 there were 17 people. Sixteen Hubbers shared the score of 99. At that point I thought, “hey, I can’t be that far behind at 82!” Of course this is not possible, as the “Best Hubbers” page states that there were approximately 179,000 Hubbers in the Hubpages universe on September 5th. If we were going down the ranks in steps of 17 Hubbers at a time, you’d get down to a score of 0 with only 1700 people. This implies a system where the lower steps are much broader than the higher ones.

The thing to do was to keep looking and checking the sizes of the echelons.

The next step down, score 98, had 20 people in it, a number still comparable with the previous two ranks. At rank 97, however there were 57 people, and there were 85 Hubbers at rank 96. The steps were getting wider already. The chart above shows graphically how these numbers compare to each other for the highest 13 Hubber scores. The vertical bars represent the Hubber scores from 100 to 88. The height of the bars is proportional to the number of people sharing that particular Hubber score. As you can see, there is very little room at the top, and this graph even understates that because it only includes the 13 highest Hubber scores. It does show the relationship between these 13 highest scores most clearly.

The graph below similarly illustrates the relationship between Hubber scores and the actual number of individuals with each score, but it has two additional columns. The two new columns on the far right represent respectively the number of individuals with a score of less than 88 (about 98.5 % of the total) and the total number of members in HubPages on the day I checked (179,000 which represents 100%). Both graphs are to scale. The thirteen highest ranks (from 100 down to 88) together comprise only about 1.5 % of the total Hubbers. The other 98.5% are lumped together in the scores of 87 and below. This means that moving up or down one Hubber score means different things depending on where you moved from. For example, if you moved from 98 to 99, you passed 16 or 17 people. If on the other hand you moved from Hubber score 88 to 89, you will have jumped past 500 people, give or take 50. I don't know how the trend continues further downward. The steps could get progressively larger, or there could be one or more plateaus somewhere. To find out one would have to know the number of persons at each Hubber score. Maybe there is a table somewhere in "Getting Started at HubPages" that provides this data, and I just missed it. If so, please let me know, and I could extend this graph to include all the ranks.

Just going by the actual numbers of members, one can tell that at least some of the steps have to be greater than 500 people, as 500 x 87 is only 43,500, and there are approximately 176,000 people with Hubber scores of 87 and below. It could be that the biggest steps are in the middle, which would provide finer detail at the two extremes.

The data in the second graph are represented in the table below as percentages of the total. (using the 179000 listed on September 5^th).

In a division where all the ranks had equal numbers of members, each Hubber score would be shared by about 1790 people, and a score of 88 would mean that you were in the top 12% overall. In the existing system, with a score of 88 you would be in the top 1.5%. That would mean about 2600 people ahead of you, compared to 21480 if each step held the same number of people.

When I finally got to my own profile, after many, many clicks (!), I was at number 7507, so at that moment there were 7506 people ahead of me in ranking, including many with the same numerical ranking as mine (82).

The next question that came to mind was: What causes the move up the ranks?  I started out with a score of 28 (twenty-eight), and I would like to think it was my hard work and excellent quality Hubs, that helped me come up in the Hubworld.  However, as of September 5, 2010 my eight Hubs have only accumulated a total of 279 views between them, and my highest-ranking Hub only has a Hubscore of 79, so there goes a perfectly good hypothesis!  (What do you mean, not everyone is fascinated by a Hub about litter box cleaning?)

I took a look at some other profiles, and saw that it is not necessarily the number of hubs or the time a person has been a member that make them ascend in the rankings.  It is possible to have only a few hubs (3 or 4) and to have been a member only a few weeks, and yet have a ranking in the 90s.  Another interesting case was a profile with a Hubber score in the low 90’s, with only four hubs, and the last one made more than a year ago.  If this person’s score is still so high after such a long period of inactivity, it shows the persistence of Hubpages’ traffic flow, and that would be a very good thing indeed for truly passive revenue generation.  On the other hand, this person may be commenting and participating a lot in other ways (see next paragraph).  Now my score of 82 didn’t seem so special anymore.  You can even have zero Hubs with only a few weeks of membership under your belt, and still have a score in the 40’s.  I know this is not high, but it clearly shows the importance of elements other than the Hubs themselves in a Hubber’s score.

That brings up the other factor in a Hubber’s upward mobility (or lack of it): interactions with fellow Hubbers and traffic coming from outside. There is a third score, called HubKarma. It indicates the level of connectedness between your Hub and other Hubs, such as how often you link your Hub to other Hubs. It also reflects participation in HubPages’ social life, such as commenting on other Hubs and answering or asking questions. In the HubPages "Tutorials and Community" pages you can get a wealth of information about the components of the scores in Hubpages, best strategies to make money, get more traffic, optimize your content for ads, etc. I am perusing these pages and learning as fast as I can. I have a long way to go.

My Hubkarma started out at zero, and is now in the 50’s. I’m sure this is still deficient, and it may be what I have to work at most. Many Hubbers have outside blogs and websites, and traffic comes in from there. I don’t have active Facebook or Twitter accounts and I know I’m missing out on a lot of possible traffic. I am a member of Xomba, and in the last couple of days a significant portion of my (extremely modest) traffic has come from that website (you can check where your traffic is coming from under “Traffic Sources” in “My Account”). At this point it doesn’t really matter where my traffic is coming from, as it is not nearly high enough to generate any revenue. Anyway, my application for an Adsense account has not been approved yet, so I won’t be getting rich anytime soon. I wonder if I even have a chance at getting an Adsense account without having my own website.

Is there a correlation between one’s Hubber score and one’s earnings? This is difficult to answer, as there are no direct statistics on earnings publicly available. Several Hubbers have been kind enough to tell us how much they are making, so we could use their self-reported data, taking them at face value. That’s for another Hub :).

Is there a correlation between the Hubber score and Hub quality? In general probably yes, although it’s a subjective question. I have read people saying that the numbers count more than the quality or the time of membership, and to some extent this may be true. In other words, if you spend 10 days working on an exquisite Hub you’ll probably end up with a lower Hubber score than someone who also makes pretty good Hubs, but not as good as yours, and much faster, say one a day. To get all the way to the top will take lots of connections, excellent optimization, pretty consistent production (although for many of the Hubbers at the 100 and 99 levels the longest time since publishing their last Hub could be measured in six days or longer), a high level of quality and some luck. My own Hubber score has slipped to 78 in the three days since I started writing this Hub. I only hope the publishing of it will not make it go down even further!

(10-31-10 update) I recently read in a Hub that if two Hubbers have the same numerical score, their ranking (which one is listed first) is determined solely by their time on Hubpages, with the senior member getting the higher ranking.  Well, I checked that out, and it does not always hold.  You can check it out for yourself.  Go to the list of "Hubbers You are Following" in your account, and you will see a list of hubbers listed according to their numerical ranking, starting with those raked highest.  Select two that have the same number, and visit each profile to check when they signed up.  I have at least one example (and I took a screen shot of it) of the more senior hubber being listed under the newer one.

I hope this Hub has been of use to those who are interested in the ranking structure at HubPages, and that it has contributed some new information that will help add to the understanding of this wonderful and multifaceted website.

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