I ranked 2,375 paid posts on Japan's biggest writing platform. The top was mostly horse racing tips.
note is where most Japanese writers sell their writing. People sell one post at a time there, mostly for a few hundred yen, so a few dollars.
I've been pulling posts from its search to see what actually sells. About 23,000 posts across 62 topics, 2,375 of them paid. note doesn't show sales, so I sorted by likes. Not the same thing, I know.
First thing I saw: 24 of the top 30 paid posts were horse racing picks, written by just three people. They put out a new pick almost every day for 300 to 500 yen ($2 to $3), and each one gets around 1,500 likes.
So I kept one post per author and looked again. The topics went all over the place, mahjong, psychology, fortune telling, airline miles, investing, parenting. 15 categories across 30 posts.
The middle price was about 540 yen (around $3.50), and half of them cost 500 yen ($3) or less. Oddly a 100,000 yen (about $630) guide to building a business with Claude Code still made the list.
What most of them did have in common was the writer. The median follower count on note for the top 30 was about 7,200. Across everyone I pulled it was 295. Still, 5 of the 30 had fewer than 1,000 followers, and one had 221.
If you sell single posts on Substack or Gumroad, did your best one line up with your follower count, or did something small break out?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Interesting that follower count seems to matter, but isn’t the whole story. The five outliers with under 1,000 followers are probably the most interesting ones to study because they might reveal what actually drove the post beyond existing audience size.
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
This is great work — what's the biggest thing you'd do differently if you started over?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
The 5 under-1k follower examples feel like the useful sample here. I’d separate them from the horse-racing outliers and look for what they had in common: unusually specific topic, timely pain, searchable title, or external traffic. That would be a much better signal for normal writers than the top 30 overall.
Good call. Here's what those 5 were:
Most of them are pretty narrow topics. I can't tell you where their traffic came from though, note doesn't show that to outsiders.