Recently I was tagged in a post where there was some conversation about the correlation of SP and post rewards and I agreed to take a look at some data

You can read the full post and thread here
https://steemit.com/steem/@maryfavour/will-hardfork-20-0-fix-a-system-where-220-steemians-earn-usd500-post.

In the comments to this post @abh12345 said

I'm guessing that if an analysis was done on showing average post reward / SP owned, the more SP owned, the higher the post reward will be.
Maybe Paula or someone would like to show that this is/ is not the case.

Before we get fully into the data, I would expect to find a correlation between reputation and post rewards. It takes time to build up your reputation on Steemit and the higher you go, the harder it gets. I also takes time to build a following. So if you spend the time on Steemit posting and curating then over time as your reputation grows, your post rewards should also grow.

Let’s take a look at the data so.

The Analysis

The scatter plot below plots the owned SP and the total post payout value for January posts. I have excluded accounts with SP of 250K or more as it skews the rest of the chart and there are very few accounts. Looking at this chart there does not appear to be a correlation between increased SP Owned and the Post Payout value.

Next I plotted the SP owned by the Average total post payout per author. Again from this chart there is no correlation between the SP Owned and the post payout

However many people delegate out their SP and therefore Owned SP is not always the same as Controlling SP. I have calculated controlling SP to be SP Owned less SP delegated out plus SP delegated in. Although there are clusters, there is no correlation present here either.

So there does not seem to be a correlation between the SP controlled and the post payout. This is to my surprise.

Disappointed that I have not found a correlation, I continued on with the data. Below the scatter chart plots the Controlling SP and the average number votes per post by author

And below shows the average number of comments per posts and the Controlling SP

So far these analysis are not showing any correlations with Controlling SP and post payout, average comments per post or average number of votes per post.

But I did find a correlation between the SP Owned and the reputation. Look at what happens when someone reaches a rep of 60

And also a correlation between the controlling SP and the reputation

On a roll now I also found a correlation between the average number of votes per post and the reputation of the author

And a correlation between the average number of comments per post and the reputation.

Wrap up and Conclusion

Although I did not find a correlation between SP held and the Post Payout value, I did find correlations between reputation and votes, comments and SP.

Next I need to look at comments as this only takes in Posts.

From my experience on Steemit, observation and studying the data in the past, here is my take on what is happening:

When people start on Steemit they have very little SP and a Rep of 25. Progression from a rep of 25 to a rep of 55 is not too difficult as long as you are actively posting and curating. However the growth from 0 – 5000 SP takes a heck of a lot longer.

Taking from the Jan Post benchmarking report the average Post payout was SBD$3.81 excluding comments. You can read that post here https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/jan-2018-steemit-post-benchmarking-report-blockchain-business-intelligence)

At the time of writing the value of SBD is $3.80 and STEEM is $3.94. Therefore it would take on average 1360 posts before someone becomes a dolphin. Now consider how many posts you do a day. I try and do 1 but average out at 26 a month. On average it would take me 56 months.

We don’t see a real increase in the SP held until the steemain reaches a rep of 45+. Let’s just zoom in on that data a little, below is the Average owned SP by Rep filtering SP owned to be under 10K. We can see from this, the real ‘investors’ with a high stake have a Rep of 60+

Looking at the chart below which plots the average gross payout value against the controlling SP but this time filtering only steemains with a rep of 45+ and control SP of less than 60K. Now we can see that there is a cluster of steemains with an SP below 20K and the average post payout is clustered under $22, however after an SP of 20K the data is more scattered as there are less steemains but their posts don’t really do any better on average.

Reputation is important, and I think this highlights just how important and it has been proven from the data above, the higher your rep, the higher your post payout. You can have little SP and a high rep and still do well.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, please do leave a comment below

The Query and Calculations

I have connected to Steemsql held and managed by @arcange using Power BI. First I connected to the Accounts table as this table contains Reputation. It also contains details of Vests, both held and delegated.

The query used for this dataset was

Select
name,
id,
created,
vesting_shares,
delegated_vesting_shares,
received_vesting_shares,
reputation
from Accounts NOLOCK

With this dataset I needed to add some calculations to convert the Reputation score as stored in the blockchain to the Rep score shown on the UI. I also needed to convert vests to SP and calculate total controlling SP.

The second table of data I connected to was the Comments table, as this table contains information about the payouts, net votes and number of comments. The query used here was

SELECT
author,
category,
created,
children,
total_payout_value,
net_votes,
pending_payout_value
FROM 
Comments (NOLOCK)
where created >= CONVERT(DATE,'2017-01-01')
and created< CONVERT(DATE,'2017-02-01')
and depth = 0

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

You can find #blockchainbi on discord https://discordapp.com/invite/JN7Yv7j

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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