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.

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Welcome to week 7 - This is the seventh 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).

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Curation and its rewards system is a complex beast. Here are some decent attempts at explaining how it works:

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

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

https://steemit.com/curation/@miniature-tiger/an-illustrated-guide-to-curation-from-the-simple-to-the-complex-with-real-examples-from-past-posts-part-1

https://steemit.com/curation/@miniature-tiger/an-illustrated-guide-to-curation-from-the-simple-to-the-complex-with-real-examples-from-past-posts-part-2

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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 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?

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

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

• Used 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.

I am still looking at the SteemSQL DB for a method to programmatically build this list - The numbers just don't quite add up at present though!

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:

• Still at the top, which has been the case now for 4 of the past 5 weeks, the unstoppable @dontstopmenow! His rewards % for the week is almost 3 times the average.

• Not far behind in 2nd, a #bisteemit member, and a new entry into the top 5 - @carlgnash - Well done Carl!

• The next 3 users @fiveboringgames, @biophil, and @buggedout, filled the these stops last week, in a different order - very consistent!

• A special mention to @edje who has improved week on week and finished 6th this week with a much improved .33 figure - nice one!

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• The average % curation reward/Steem Power this week is 0.17615, up considerably from 0.15266 last week - the league has bunched together somewhat, which is nice to see for the purists

• My score is still way below average - It's cool though :)

• I will be digging into the voting patterns of @dontstopmenow and @carlgnash this week, as I feel it'll be interesting to see - you might be surprised just where their votes go.

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 ( @htliao and @tumutanzi you guys will be back in next week)

• 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. e.g. @pharesim, @good-karma, and @acidyo

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

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.}

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

Asher