Calculating Voting Bot Profitability

Happy weekend everyone!

Continuing my topic on voting bots (see my previous post here), there was a request from a friend to write about how to compute for the adjusted returns and see if your bid has been profitable or not.

As an example, here are two recent bids I've made over the weekend:

Voting Bot	@minnowfairy	@steembidbot
Bid Amount	0.500 SBD	0.100 SBD
Upvote Result (USD)	$1.023	$0.247

At first glance, they seem to be quite profitable. However, you have to consider that the returns are reported in USD, and there will be some deductions and conversions needed before we can appropriately compare for profitability. (In short, the returns won't be this good..sadly.)

Here are the steps to compute the adjusted returns:

1. First, if the upvote is done more than half hour after the post is published, the author gets 75% of the upvote return. So let us factor this in:
   • @minnowfairy: $1.023 * 0.75 = $0.767
   • @steembidbot: $0.247 * 0.75 = $0.185
     
     
2. Second, whenever you publish your post, you'll have the option to choose whether you want your upvote returns to be 50% SBD/50% SP or 100% SP. This will affect our final payout. As I have mentioned in a previous post, you will be more profitable to choose 50%/50% as long as the SBD rate is greater than US$1, as is the case now (1 SBD = $1.71091). So assuming I chose 50%/50% (as I had really done), the breakdown of our return now will be:
   • @minnowfairy: $0.383 for SBD, $0.383 for SP
   • @steembidbot: $0.092 for SBD, $0.092 for SP
     
     
3. Third, remember these are based on USD so we need to convert them to SBD in order to make the appropriate comparison. Based on this post: "within the Steemit payout system, SBD is always pegged to 1 USD and Steem is paid at its external market value in the form of Steem Power (SP)."
   Let's look at how this applies in our example:
   • For the first 50% return, since "SBD is always pegged to 1 USD", no complex conversion is necessary:
     • @minnowfairy: $0.383 = 0.383 SBD
     • @steembidbot: $0.092 = 0.092 SBD
   • For the second 50% return, since "Steem is paid at its external market value", this means we'll have to take the current exchange rate of Steem to arrive at how much SP we'll get. The current exchange rate is 1 Steem = $1.62884.
     • @minnowfairy: $0.383 / $1.62884 = 0.235 SP
     • @steembidbot: $0.092 / $1.62884 = 0.056 SP
       
       
4. But wait, hold on. Our bid was in SBD, so we should actually convert all our returns to SBD to make an apples-to-apples comparison. So just for the sake of checking for profitability, we need to convert the second 50% return into SBD instead. The current exchange rate is 1 SBD = $1.71091.
   • @minnowfairy: $0.383 / $1.71091 = 0.223 SBD
   • @steembidbot: $0.092 / $1.71091 = 0.054 SBD
     
     
5. We now have both parts in SBD so finally we can sum them up to get the adjusted return in SBD:
   • @minnowfairy: 0.383 SBD + 0.223 SBD = 0.606 SBD
   • @steembidbot: 0092 SBD + 0.054 SBD = 0.146 SBD

That's it. Here now is our updated table:

Voting Bot	@minnowfairy	@steembidbot
Bid Amount	0.500 SBD	0.100 SBD
Upvote Result	$1.023	$0.247
Adjusted Returns	0.606 SBD	0.146 SBD
ROI	21.2%	46.0%

From here, we can see that both bids have been quite profitable. However, I've mentioned before that this will not always be the case. So lest you be lulled into a false sense of security, there is always a possiblity that you will get a negative ROI from your bid.

Another thing to note is that the return is the initial amount computed. However, since the actual payout will only happen 7 days later, it is quite possible that you'll get a slightly different return when the time comes.

You can save yourself from doing all these computations. Simply go to the Steem Bot Tracker site. The site will give you a quick glance on real time profitability of each voting bot.

Hope this helps.