Hi all

The first week is complete and I have some prizes to give away. Enter this weeks' league today for a chance to win some STEEM!

This means that I am willing to add anyone to the table who shows interest in the comments.

There will be some more STEEM prizes on offer for people who enter this week - show your interest in the comments section below.

On your marks, get set, curate!

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How well are you curating financially?

Are you making the best use of your Steem Power and votes?

This post looks at how well the users on this list are curating, purely from a financial perspective.

Introduction

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My general opinion on curation is:

• Voting in the first minute will earn you a curation reward of almost 0.000

• Voting between 1 and 29 minutes will earn an increasing % of the curation rewards split, this value peaking at 30 minutes and remaining the same from this point onwards

• The goal is to get in prior to the big hitters, but not too early!

• It is commonly suggested that 20-25 minutes is the 'best' time to vote (especially on known power-authors posts because they are likely to have more auto-votes coming in at these times - and you want to be ahead of these votes)

• A vote of equal weight and equal Steem Power at 30 minutes will give more reward than a vote at, for example 1 hour - first come first served, but don't arrive to early :)

As you can see, a combination of many variables such as Steem Power, voting strength, voting weight, and time of vote, (and more) all play a part in the amount of reward received.

Is there a skill to it though? And how well are you doing?

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The data

The raw data has been collected from SteemSQL - @arcange's MS SQL Server copy of the Steem Blockchain.

The key formula used for 'quality of financial curation skill' is:

Curation Rewards DIVIDED BY Steem Power MULTIPLIED BY 1000

This will return the amount of Curation rewards gained per 1000 Steem Power held

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Before I present the table (which has entrants from the previous Blogs and those who wished to be added by making themselves known in last week's comments), this is the criteria needed to be fulfilled to have a chance of appearing on the list:

• Must have voted at least once on a piece of content in the past 7 days

• Must not have leased or delegated Steem Power in the last 15 days

• Must not have Started a Power Down (Withdrawl of Steem Power) in the last 15 days

The 2nd and 3rd points above are required to reduce distortion of the figures. And, as curation rewards for the past week are actually taken from votes made up to 14 days ago, we need a 15 day window as mentioned in these points.

This weeks' results

User	C Rewards	Steem Power	Votes Cast	Reward per 1000 SP
dontstopmenow	4.239795	1106.442797	257	3.831915
buggedout	14.620778	3880.368783	370	3.767884
rok-sivante	223.546607	98786.01577	264	2.262938
htliao	28.865476	18357.46765	701	1.572411
steemtrail	17.182371	11483.03204	180	1.496327
paulag	61.554174	42692.67886	204	1.441797
xervantes	6.015066	4317.902741	218	1.393053
steemitri	2.510463	1885.932921	180	1.331152
gniksivart	1.518287	1181.509337	172	1.28504
edje	1.947267	1631.055244	74	1.193869
thinknzombie	6.179127	5562.537054	1906	1.110847
costanza	5.357919	5029.604032	309	1.065277
retiredinsamar	0.432097	510.797119	72	0.845927
josediccus	0.293057	353.738532	179	0.828457
mammasitta	11.154939	14549.00597	593	0.766715
mariannewest	1.693312	2465.738228	253	0.686736
karensuestudios	4.187893	6350.658369	126	0.659442
smasssh	2.813534	4337.688024	151	0.648625
joe.nobel	0.151022	303.27658	41	0.497968
miniature-tiger	0.522098	1106.578697	68	0.471813
blazing	0.165031	432.556868	870	0.381524

The end column is what I think is a genuine indicator of how well you are financially working the curation game with the tools,including vested Steem Power, that you have at your disposal.

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Chart and Analysis

Amount of SP earned per 1000 Steem Power owned

This weeks' findings:

• Personally, I think it's right to see the main man @dontstopmenow back at the top of the league and gaining the first prize. A table topper multiple times in the past and this weeks winner of 5 STEEM. Nice one man!

• @dontstopmenow has a trail you can follow at https://steemauto.com/ - this should bring you closer to him, but you'll need to find your own gems to over-take!

• @buggedout will be recieving 2.5 STEEM for finishing a close 2nd, well done!

• My 3rd prize (which will change in criteria each week) of 2.5 STEEM is going to @thinknzombie for voting 1906 times in the past 7 days, wow!

• A mention to @rok-sivante, the largest SP holder in the list with almost 100,000 SP. I see this account is curating @utopian-io posts including mine at times - This seems like a good plan!

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• The average curation reward/Steem Power this week is 1.311 Steem Power

A good target to aim for would be 1.5 SP per every 1000 vested SP.

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Finally

A few points:

• If you have spotted any glaring errors in my post, please let me know so I can fix them

• If you would like to be added or removed from my personal curation league (next weeks post) let me know

• If you have any other comments, please enter them into the box below

• A prize for top of the table and other secret criteria(!) will be given in next weeks post

And ...

• I feel that curation should be about finding awesome content and giving it an up-vote - irrelevant of the curation rewards you might receive

• Help the Steem Blockchain grow, support quality content from newer authors

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_{I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #bisteemit. If you have analysis you would like to be carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you.}

_{I am contactable on many discord channels under the same username.}

_{Data was collected on the 10th December (MY BIRTHDAY!) 2017 at 9:00 am CET}

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Thanks for reading today

Asher