Curation Rewards Analysis: @minnowbooster Megaboosts!

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This article is a follow-on to a post I made on @minnowbooster a week ago. That post looked at the impact on curation and author rewards of delaying @minnowbooster upvotes until a post was at least fifteen minutes old. In the comments I discussed with @reggaemuffin the potential rewards available from frontrunning much larger minnowbooster upvotes. Well now those upvotes have arrived, in the form of the @minnowbooster "whitelist" Megaboosts!
(You can read @minnowbooster's introductory communication on the Megaboosts here.)

I decided to put my analysis tools to work looking at the potential curation rewards available from frontrunning these huge @minnowbooster upvotes, this time on some real posts. Although none of the articles have completed their seven day "live" period, the levels and patterns of curation rewards are already broadly set - it would need a huge level of voting now to uplift the curation rewards significantly (not impossible - but remember it takes a x4 movement in post payout to double curation rewards).

No significant frontrunning of the @minnowbooster upvote actually occurred on any of the posts, either automated or manual, so as a further analysis I've modelled the upvotes and rewards and estimated the maximum level of upvote that could have been made for different levels of curation rewards.

I've chosen three examples (purely based on their pattern and timing of upvotes):

• This post by @mooncryption for which the @minnowbooster upvote arrives at the 15 minute mark - the earliest time possible.
• This post by @bania for which the @minnowbooster upvote arrives after 24 minutes - around the duration at which many automated upvoters typically make their play.
• This post (visit - it's for a good cause!) by @bulleth : A different pattern, illustrating the impact of large early votes on frontrunning potential.

As always, the results are dependent on which posts are chosen, so the following analysis should be considered illustrative of the concepts under discussion.

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Megaboost at the 15 minute mark (@mooncryption)

In the chart below the curation rewards as a percentage of the upvote value are shown in orange (and measured against the left hand axis). The blue columns are the upvotes, the largest being from @minnowbooster (and measured against the right hand axis). The first chart covers the full upvote period at the time of the analysis, the second focuses on the early duration where the frontrunning would take place.

The @minnowbooster upvote was for around $51 and arrived after 15 minutes. The previous curator at 11 minutes will receive a high curation reward as a percentage of upvote, but only on a very small amount. How much capacity was there for frontrunning with various levels of curation rewards? According to my remodelling, by inserting another upvote just prior to the Megaboost there was capacity for:

• "100% of upvote" curation rewards: $0
• " 75% of upvote " curation rewards: $0.30
• " 50% of upvote " curation rewards: $1.60
  i.e. an upvote of $1.60 at just-before-15 minutes would have been in line for 50% curation rewards, so $0.80.

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Megaboost at the 24 minute mark (@bania)

The equivalent charts but for a much larger Megaboost - $160 after 24 minutes.

Here we can see some curators are in line for rewards of nearly 200% of upvote. However there was still room for plenty more! Again, by inserting another upvote just prior to the Megaboost there was capacity for:

• "100% of upvote" curation rewards: $2.10
• " 75% of upvote " curation rewards: $6.20
• " 50% of upvote " curation rewards: $20.70
  i.e. an upvote of $2.10 at just-before-24 minutes would have been in line for 100% curation rewards, so $2.10.

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Megaboost with early significant upvotes (@bulleth)

Finally, the example showing the impact on frontrunning potential from significant upvotes prior to the Megaboost - almost $30 had already been contributed to this very worthwhile cause prior to the Megaboost of $120.

As would be expected with significant prior upvotes the frontrunning potential is limited, although curation rewards are still at a very respectable 25% for many early voters.

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Some brief conclusions

• Although these are only a very few examples, the results are in line with my expectations: frontrunning is already much more attractive around 25 minutes than at the current minimum of 15 minutes. I think you could make a good argument for a longer delay on Megaboost posts given the obvious demand and value of this service.

• There is potentially significant capacity for frontrunning at the 50% level of rewards - which may be of interest to those calling for a 50/50 split of author and curation rewards.

• The users on the whitelist may not be on as many autovoters as steem's most succesful authors - so competition for their curation rewards may be lower, at least for a while.

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Thanks for reading!