I followed every gold TIP in WarEra

36,135 articles. 176,473 tips. 882,365 gold. Here is who earned it, who funded it, and why begging beats journalism.

Last time I counted every punishment in this game. Several of you asked me to count something cheerful instead.

Fine. Let's count the money. :HACKERMANS:

It starts at 16:07 UTC on 19 July 2025.

A https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6 player called https://app.warera.io/user/682946176eb7334102607230 finishes an article titled https://app.warera.io/article/687bc11165e9f8a9707b9d8d and sends its author five gold. The author, https://app.warera.io/user/6859942613fe5b2347e9bf7c, is also https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6. The article had gone up six minutes earlier.

That is the first tip in the history of WarEra, and it tells you almost everything. It was fast, it was small, and it was domestic... a https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6n paying a https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6n, which as we'll see is how most of this money still moves.

The article that started an 882,365 gold economy has fifty-one views and two tips. Nobody has touched it since.

By the end of that first day, thirty-one tips had been sent by twenty-one people to seventeen writers. The biggest earner in the game that day was a player called https://app.warera.io/user/681ec174f6f19b81b61aeb4b, who made thirty gold.

None of them were first, though. The first article in WarEra https://app.warera.io/article/6813bab5baaf1d619a3e5ca1, by https://app.warera.io/user/6813b76aefecdf9bab196303 was published on 1 May 2025, and 1,889 articles went up before anybody was paid a coin for any of them.

The game had a press for seventy-nine days before it had an economy.

Then it caught.

Part I: The curve

July 2026 is on pace for roughly 33,932 tips — 17.5 times August 2025, the first full month of tipping. December was the break: tips more than doubled in a single month and never came back down.

That last bar looks like a decline. It isn't. July has 28 days on the clock and is running at the fastest rate this game has ever seen.

The single busiest day on record was 29 April 2026: 2,197 tips in twenty-four hours. Roughly one every forty seconds, all day.

Total to date: 176,473 tips, each worth exactly five gold, because that's the only amount the button gives. 882,365 gold has moved from readers to writers, five coins at a time.

Part II: The ledger

You want names. Here are names.

Largest positive tip balance — received minus given

1. https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9 — +10,110g · received 11,245, gave 1,135

2. https://app.warera.io/user/6840719c83d6e0c62c8d1fb3 — +4,920g · received 7,230, gave 2,310

3. https://app.warera.io/user/697558ff244a51dff0749db6 — +4,830g · received 5,140, gave 310

4. https://app.warera.io/user/69773c2781af219a70826739 — +3,985g · gave 95g in his life

5. https://app.warera.io/user/682a2ecc2b7638095656d4cd — +3,840g · gave 345

6. https://app.warera.io/user/69e8a3b87f9a1cfe17a8ab71 — +3,320g · gave 85g

7. https://app.warera.io/user/6997515009891b0b401a9137 — +3,075g · gave 630

8. https://app.warera.io/user/683908aa9f84b9712a1b9098 — +3,030g · gave 180

9. https://app.warera.io/user/6976afb9713451d626e54737 — +2,905g · received 6,155, gave back 3,250

10. https://app.warera.io/user/699b2ff0e71fa94cb553b3c4 — +2,900g gave 2,735

https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9of https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79c holds more than twice the positive balance of anyone else alive. We'll come back to how.

Note the difference in style, though. https://app.warera.io/user/69773c2781af219a70826739 has taken 4,080 gold from this community and put back ninety-five. https://app.warera.io/user/6976afb9713451d626e54737 received more than him and returned three thousand two hundred and fifty of it. Same leaderboard, opposite citizens.

Largest net contributors — the people who pay for all this

1. https://app.warera.io/user/683bec4b8e35000e012bcd2f — −2,400g · gave 2,875, received 475

2. https://app.warera.io/user/692b3fdf7c6ffcfbe26aabb3 — −2,220g · gave 2,335, received 115

3. https://app.warera.io/user/688fb4d576391af3ceb235ad— −2,170g · gave 2,305, received 135

4. https://app.warera.io/user/6887ddba8776ae91a82c2cff — −2,155g · received 95

5. https://app.warera.io/user/699cc6f2a813b6defd87b886 — −2,140g · received exactly zero

6. https://app.warera.io/user/68376967f0ca9d207356c157 — −2,080g · recieved 280

7. https://app.warera.io/user/69542e947a4dd513077e183b — −2,040g · received 660

8. https://app.warera.io/user/688e72ae9ba385a60816df04 — −1,970g · received 350

9. https://app.warera.io/user/692a967278eab26a65ecf084 — −1,965g · received 20

10. https://app.warera.io/user/681d214d470bf2a142942642 — −1,825g · received 135

https://app.warera.io/user/699cc6f2a813b6defd87b886 has given away 2,140 gold and has never once been paid a single coin in return.

Neither has https://app.warera.io/user/69a5fc6a4b58ede5ab0d3424 of the Netherlands — 1,550 gold out, nothing back. These two are the closest thing this game has to philanthropists, and I'd never heard of either until I ran the numbers. Nobody writes articles about the audience.

Part III — What actually sells

WarEra has an official article category called begging. Two thousand five hundred and ninety-four articles have been filed under it. Their entire content is asking you for money.

Begging — 2,594 articles · 11.5 tips each · 8.18 tips per 100 views

Everything else — 33,541 articles · 4.2 tips each · 2.24 tips per 100 views

Begging receives 2.7 times more tips per article — and 3.65 times more tips per view — than everything else.

Add the solicitations filed under other categories and it comes to 31,040 tips — 17.6% of everything articles have ever earned. Nearly one gold in five that this community has paid to "writers" went to somebody who simply asked.

And the best beggar is the richest man

159 tips — https://app.warera.io/article/69d9a34a429b60c9de058995 ( https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9)

131 tips — https://app.warera.io/article/6a3ed494da6c92d41b50e7bc (https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9)

125 tips — https://app.warera.io/article/69f24bc371ad7e57089c8722 (https://app.warera.io/user/682b3b3623fc6627b5096323)

74 tips — https://app.warera.io/article/69cb9c3681e910bbbb81371b (https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9)

72 tips — https://app.warera.io/article/6a466df22c9dcfce4c071d55 (https://app.warera.io/user/682787e1a3cf9ba485f027b9)

The writer with the largest positive balance in the history of this game runs a business openly advertised as bribery. He declared fictional bankruptcy and was paid 159 tips for it. He sells government badges at five gold a go. He is not hiding any of this... the branding is the product.

I have complicated feelings about this and all of them are admiration.

Which category pays, once the solicitations are out

News is the most-written category in the game and one of the worst-paid. 13,418 articles — more than a third of everything ever published — earning 3.9 tips apiece. Meanwhile stats and guide pay more on a tenth of the volume.

If you want to be read, write news. If you want to be paid, write a guide. If you want to be rich, ask.

Part IV: The best articles ever written

Most-tipped single articles (solicitations excluded)

560 — https://app.warera.io/article/694b331040e3a562f55b8154 · https://app.warera.io/user/6813b758efecdf9bab195068

199 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a312963d8478ac8d58f9c3a · https://app.warera.io/user/69b1c21aa08441c71e4c80cd

189 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a3129b58346b863db233ccb · https://app.warera.io/user/696094dd2e5a377b9e513596

179 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a5928eb611af63a032b52c7 · https://app.warera.io/user/69a00dd2fd0fa6c54422f435

166 — https://app.warera.io/article/69c79b62e45a318f08f4c69d · https://app.warera.io/user/6813b76defecdf9bab196743

123 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a32b001425da2a9550a823c · https://app.warera.io/user/69754ae9d2aa2e1e50d5d227

122 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a3adcf0b9d20b7b1daa6d75 · https://app.warera.io/user/68adb15efb9ced3a126a569e

121 — https://app.warera.io/article/6a303606599cec872095d930 · https://app.warera.io/user/697a669d0ae08b8658961147

The most valuable article ever published in WarEra is a patch note. https://app.warera.io/user/6813b758efecdf9bab195068's changelog earned 560 tips — nearly three times the next best thing anyone has ever written. We are a community that pays triple for release notes.

And The War Room Incident appears three times in that list, from three different authors. Which brings me to the thing I did not expect to find.

The same title, over and over

Two hundred and ninety-one article titles in this game have been published by two or more different people.

"The War Room Incident" is one of them. Four authors ran it: https://app.warera.io/user/69b1c21aa08441c71e4c80cd of Croatia (199 tips), https://app.warera.io/user/696094dd2e5a377b9e513596 (189), https://app.warera.io/user/697a669d0ae08b8658961147 (121), and a Dutch account that got three. 512 tips between them for one headline.

https://app.warera.io/user/696094dd2e5a377b9e513596is the interesting one. He has published exactly one article in his entire life — that one — and earned 189 tips for it. If the efficiency table below had no minimum, he would top it by a distance, with a title somebody else wrote first.

But the record for coordination belongs to https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a2:

"Progetto supporto MOS" — 346 tips, published by eighteen different authors, every single one of them Italian.

https://app.warera.io/article/6a3bc0ce5e9c2dca9d00bf97

https://app.warera.io/article/6a442ed3523e7b631c780f4d

https://app.warera.io/article/6a3c16138c4523d1482672f8

https://app.warera.io/article/6a4beb57659490ee6dda2cf9

https://app.warera.io/article/6a43b5e97b0d9d70b4464e12

https://app.warera.io/article/6a535810d0c0e9d2121a3850... and so on

Eighteen (18) separate accounts, one identical headline, 11 to 31 tips apiece. Nothing else in 36,135 articles comes close.

There is an innocent reading, and it's a fair one: that is what an organised military-unit fundraising drive looks like. Eighteen people asking their countrymen for the same cause on the same day is coordination, but it is coordinated asking, not fake tipping. Whether it crosses a line is a moderator's call, not mine.

Others are plainly habit. Six https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7eb authors have published articles titled "Yeni başladım" and seven more "Selamlar" — new players introducing themselves with the obvious words. And https://app.warera.io/user/6972829fbcd04419d1bc93cf of https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ba has published "BREAKING NEWS! 🚨" around sixty times, 60!!!, earning three to thirteen tips each. That is not a ring. That is one man with a template and remarkable stamina.

Best tips per article — minimum three published articles, solicitations excluded

1. https://app.warera.io/user/69754ae9d2aa2e1e50d5d227— 82.3 · 4 articles, 329 tips

2. https://app.warera.io/user/69b1c21aa08441c71e4c80cd — 38.7 · 7 articles

3. https://app.warera.io/user/69e8a3b87f9a1cfe17a8ab71— 28.5 · 21 articles, 598 tips

4. https://app.warera.io/user/6840719c83d6e0c62c8d1fb3 — 23.3 · 62 articles, 1,446 tips

5. https://app.warera.io/user/697a669d0ae08b8658961147 — 20.4 · 15 articles

Twelve of the top fifteen are Balkan or https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6 — https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7f5, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7bc, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80e, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ba, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac814 and https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6between them. The other three are https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac842, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7aeand the https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a0. It is a region that publishes rarely, publishes short, and gets paid several times the global average per piece.

But the real professional is https://app.warera.io/user/6840719c83d6e0c62c8d1fb3. Everyone above him wrote a handful of articles and got lucky. He has published sixty-two and averaged twenty-three tips on every one. That is the hardest number on this page to fake.

Part V: How unequal is it?

5,502 people have earned at least one tip. Here is the middle of that list:

The median author has earned ten tips. In total. Ever. Fifty gold.

Top 1% of authors — 18.2% of all tips

Top 5% — 42.7%

Top 10% — 57.9%

Gini coefficient — 0.707

A Gini coefficient of 0.707 means WarEra article earnings are extraordinarily concentrated. Ten percent of the writers take six gold in every ten.

If you published something, earned ten tips and quietly stopped — you are exactly the middle of the distribution.

(Before anyone checks: I sit 46th all-time on 357 tips, and fifty-six of those arrived in the last three days. Ask me again next month.)

Part VI: The man with seventy-eight fans

Most writers get roughly one tip per reader. https://app.warera.io/user/6813b76defecdf9bab196743 has 166 tips from 166 separate people, which is what a normal readership looks like.

Then there is https://app.warera.io/user/682a2ecc2b7638095656d4cd. 837 tips. Seventy-eight people.

Among the 386 authors who have received a hundred tips or more, that is 10.7 tips per reader — nearly double the next most concentrated writer in that group, and against a median of 1.9. About 3x is normal for a large writer. https://app.warera.io/user/682a2ecc2b7638095656d4cd is triple the normal.

I'm not going to tell you what that is, because I don't know. It could be the most devoted readership in WarEra. But it is the strangest number in this dataset and it deserves an explanation from somebody who has one.

Part VII: Nobody reads foreigners

One limitation before this section: the data records each account's current country, not where it stood when a tip was sent. Players move. Anyone who has changed flag is counted under the new one throughout.

The newsletter isn't one audience. It's about fifteen national reading circles that barely touch. Among the 104 countries that have received at least 300 tips:

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7eb — 77% of tips to Turkish writers come from Turkish readers

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a0 — 73%

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79a — 72%

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b8 — 70%

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7eb received 9,221 tips and sent 9,245 — a difference of twenty-four across more than eighteen thousand.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79c received 12,985 and sent 12,977: a gap of eight tips.

These aren't audiences. They're circles. The money goes round and comes back.

The opposite exists too: only 22% of the tips earned by writers in https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac81d, https://app.warera.io/country/687eab339142f76907295e4e, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15fa or https://app.warera.io/country/6873d0ea1758b40e712b5f3d come from their own countrymen. At the very bottom sit https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac89c (2%), https://app.warera.io/country/696a81da63e2489f47e5a28e (3%), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac814 (3%), https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15d3 (3%) and https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7f5 (4%).. writers whose audience is almost entirely foreign.

Group the countries into alliance blocs and the same pattern holds:

benelux    74.8%    15,078 of 20,168 tips from within
baltics    71.2%     3,689 of  5,184
turkic     66.9%     8,793 of 13,140
iberia     66.5%     5,842 of  8,787
balkans    63.1%     7,022 of 11,122
arab       63.1%     8,878 of 14,065
adriatic   62.5%     5,861 of  9,384
dach       54.4%     7,533 of 13,855
nordics    39.8%     2,195 of  5,509

Bloc membership, so you can check the working —
benelux: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a0, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a4, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7fb.
baltics: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b8, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7c0, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7e2.
turkic: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7eb, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8d1, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8c1, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8ce, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8c4, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8be.
iberia: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a8, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7aa, https://app.warera.io/country/687eab339142f76907295e4e.
balkans: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ba, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac814, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7f5, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac817, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac811, https://app.warera.io/country/6873d0ea1758b40e712b5ef7, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80e.
arab: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac845, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac852, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af1606, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15c3, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8cb, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac848, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84e, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af160f, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15c7, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8e0, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8dd, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15b5.
adriatic: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7bc, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b4, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a2.
dach: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79c, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ac, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a6.
nordics: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7f2, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac802, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ef, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80b, https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15c5.

No country appears in two blocs; Croatia is grouped with the Adriatic rather than the Balkans, which is a judgement call and would move that row if made differently.

The most inward-looking media economy in WarEra belongs to the Low Countries. The Nordics, at under 40%, are the only group who genuinely read the rest of the world.

What it all comes to

Just over a year ago, this economy was zero. Today 11,990 people a third of everyone who has ever held an account have paid a writer for something they read.

It is also extraordinarily concentrated, largely segregated by nationality, quietly subsidised by a handful of patrons who get nothing back, and its most reliably rewarded activity is asking for money without writing anything at all.

Which, now I write it down, makes it exactly like every media industry that has ever existed.

Sources and limitations. 176,473 article tips (19 July 2025 – 28 July 2026) and all 36,135 articles ever published, from WarEra's public transaction and article endpoints, cross-referenced against 33,972 accounts. Every tip is a fixed 5 gold, so tips and gold are interchangeable. Solicitations = the game's own "begging" category (2,594) plus 167 further articles identified by title keyword; roughly 5–8 of those are false positives, under 0.5% of the excluded total. Category counts are drawn from per-article statistics, which total about 6,800 fewer tips than the transaction ledger — most likely because 405 articles have been deleted by moderators, so their tips survive in the ledger but their stats do not. Concentration figures cover the 386 authors with 100+ tips received. Country self-funding covers the 104 countries with 300+ tips received. Nationality reflects each account's current country, not its country when a tip was sent. Percentages are computed against the 176,473-tip ledger unless stated. Transaction records carry no article ID, so the first tip's target is inferred: Meta-utopian had published two articles by 16:07 on 19 July 2025, and "Don't Tread On Me" went up six minutes before the tip arrived. Tip history is reconstructed from per-user transaction records across 36,971 accounts, so this is the earliest visible tip rather than a certified first.

A note on what this article does not say: several patterns above are consistent with coordinated tipping, and equally consistent with communities reading their own writers, fundraising together, and covering the same events. I have published the numbers and the innocent explanations side by side because transaction data alone cannot separate them. Nobody named here has been accused of breaking a rule.

— https://app.warera.io/user/697b55e4bcecf3b37667e0d1

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