[ticmasta]

generally these types of activities don't actually follow a bell curve but a power law where a very tiny population reap the vast majority of the rewards and everyone else shares the scraps, trailing off and approaching zero. Think 10 YT videos get 10 billion views and the rest share a billion, with the mean being somewhere close to zero

[zarro]

Power laws can arise as natural consequences of aggregation of high variance data. General Central Limit Theorem says distributions of data with limited variability tend to follow the Normal (bell-shaped, or Gaussian) curve, but aggregation of high (or infinite) variance data leads to power laws. Thus, the bell curve is normal for low-variance data and the power law curve is normal for high-variance data.