Steemit: Curation League - Week 5 - Trails added for analysis and new leader!

How well are you curating financially? Are you making the best use of your Steem Power and votes?

This is the fifth post in a series which looks at a method to work out just how well your curation skills rank against other Steemians.

The users listed in this report have been selected at random and vary in account size (Steem Power).

---

Curation and its rewards system is a complex beast. The structure of how the rewards are decided upon for each voter have been explained many times in detail, and here are two I have found which I think do a good job:

https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/

https://steemit.com/steemit/@calamus056/curation-rewards-explained-in-great-detail

My takeouts from the above, and general opinion 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 in that your % in the 2nd point isn't too low (e.g. 15 minutes - approx 50%)

• It is commonly suggested that 25-30 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?

Currently, @carlgnash has a couple of excellent blogs titled 'Curate Like a Boss' which all keen curators, and people seeking to learn more about the underlying DataBase structure of the rewards system should check out. Cheers Carl!

I have used the following method to obtain what I need for this report.

• Use steemit.com Wallet to collect Steem Power and + or - the leased/delegated steem
  

• Use the 'Rewards' drop-down menu to find 'Curation rewards' for the previous week
  

Therefore, my data is gathered manually and the curation period is only for the previous week.

This is obviously not ideal and reduces the potential to widen the results set because of the time it takes to gather the data.
Hopefully in future, we can programmatically obtain a much larger set for analysis.

This weeks results

The key columns are:

• Curation: Total curation rewards for the previous week

• SP Total: Total vested Steem Power (including delegated SP)

• Curation/SP %: The % of curation rewarded Steem Power in relation to amount of Steem Power owned

This final column is what I feel is a genuine indicator of how well you are working the curation game with the tools (including vested Steem Power) that you have at your disposal.

Imagine you have 10,000 Steem Power, and I have 1,000 Steem Power.

After a week curating, the rewards for both of us are 1 SP each.

In my mind, I'm working my Steem Power 10 X harder - If you, in this example earned curation rewards of 10 SP (and I earned 1 SP), then I would say we were curating with equal skill - rewards wise.

The % of curation rewarded Steem Power in relation to amount of Steem Power owned

This weeks' findings:

• We have a new league leader! - Congratulations to @biophil who is curating 4 times better than this weeks average with 0.68 SP/rewards % @biophil has moved from 3rd, into 2nd, and now top spot over the past 3 weeks - Tell us your secrets Phil!

• Excellent work again from @dontstopmenow who is in 2nd after two weeks at the top - Curating (for rewards) at over 3 times the average. I have a recent interview with @dontstopmeknow if you missed it and wish to read about his successful curation style

• @buggedout again takes the 3rd spot - a very consistent curator who I would like to speak to also :)

• In fourth place this week is a minnow with only 39 SP - @gniksivart has 36 SP delegated which could be skewing the results for him slightly

• A special mention this week to @fitinfun who has moved up to 6th place this week. I know that she is very interested in how curation can work for her so I'm glad to see @fitinfun moving up the ranks :)

• @htliao, a whale with over 500,000 SP is consistently the best curator (rewards) with this huge amount of Steem Power

---

• I'm happy to see my curation rewards % rise this week, and I'm currently sitting close to the average. I have tried to be a disciplined as possible with comment voting to reserve voting power, but I think voting comments is a really important thing to do, especially on your own blogs.

• Ignoring the very generous @pharesim @good-karma, the ratio between top and bottom curator in the table is almost 33 X

• The average % curation reward/Steem Power is 0.15869, improved over last week where it was 0.14816

• It's still debatable whether a very large amount of Steem Power restricts curation performance using these figures. e.g. at 500,000 SP, you are giving a post the highest reward, and cannot 'soak' enough of the curation reward up to reach a high curation %. (My advice for such large accounts would be to lower your voting power and try to 'match' it with how you think the post will do financially - if you would like to discuss this point with me then drop me a message)

• Following on from the point above, only 1 of the top 15 curators in my league have over 10,000 Steem Power. This is the new addition, @qurator which has a trail in place now also

• Accounts @roomservice and @botdot are 'front-running' @booster. Nothing special to report with regards to rewards though.

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 a user has powered down or powered up Steem in the past week, the results will be skewed

• Some Users, 'Power Users', and Whales (listed in this post and otherwise) are not aiming for max. curation rewards, and are supporting communities with their votes ( @pharesim, @good-karma, and @acidyo)

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

And finally...

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

---

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.

---

Thanks for reading today, any feedback is very welcome as always

Asher