Curation Rewards Analysis: @ocd

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A little side-step from my Illustrated Guide to Curation series today (although if you're interested in a visual explanation of the detail of curation you can find part 1 here and part 2 here).

Why the distraction? Well this morning my attention was caught by a post from @acidyo about the @ocd curation project: https://steemit.com/curation/@acidyo/some-info-about-ocd-and-an-incentive-for-manual-curators.

The article gives an in depth explanation of the function of @ocd and is well worth a read. The @ocd is also worth following for many reasons: they support new and underrated authors who produce quality work, there's a range of topics - so something for everyone, and they find some absolute gems!

But the parts that caught my eye this morning were the references to curation rewards (I paraphrase briefly):
"Comparing this curation project to others ... is that here you get a chance to vote on the nominations before the bigger votes come in thus giving you more rewards in return...I generally vote on the compilation posts at the 30 minute mark or the next day ... nominations from that post are generally voted on a day after which gives readers and manual curators lots of room to get their votes in on time on posts they like."

Sounds intriguing. Since I've developed the tools to analyse curation rewards it seemed like an ideal opportunity to test them out. Here's what I found.

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Curation Rewards on: ocd daily issue 99

https://steemit.com/ocd/@ocd/ocd-daily-issue-99

I started by looking at the list of @ocd compilation posts and picked one that looked typical. I then extracted the data from steemsql and ran it through my tools. It's a pretty high value post: Past Payouts $129.12; Author $102.91; Curators $26.21; 190 votes. Here's what the curation rewards look like (using the ratio "curation reward / upvote value"):

Full post:
The first chart shows the “curation reward / upvote value" ratio for each curator as the orange line (left hand axis). The upvote values are shown as blue columns (right hand axis). As only the largest upvotes can be seen on this scale I have added the smaller upvotes increased by a factor of 100x (also on the right hand axis) as the blue dots. The x-axis shows the time in minutes of each of the curators by order of upvoting (this axis is not to scale).

Focus on Early duration
The second chart shows the same information but focused on the early duration (the blue dots have been removed as the scale is smaller).

Conclusions:

• There are some very high curation reward ratios at early durations but only for the very smallest of upvotes.

• There are some sizeable curation rewards available up to around the 23 minute mark. As these posts are very popular there is substantial competition for these curation rewards including from automated upvoters. However there is opportunity for manual curators to nip in at around 23 minutes with 50c/$1.00 upvotes for some good curation rewards.

• For comparison most curation rewards received fall between the 25% and 12.5% ratio level.

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Curation Rewards on: @pinstory post

https://steemit.com/art/@pinstory/introducing-my-art-and-me-2017109t82712404z
This is a wonderful author with some extraordinarily cute and whimsical musings and doodles - I thoroughly recommend following them!

I then turned to a couple of the curated articles from ocd99 and performed the same analysis. This first post received: Past Payouts $14.42, Author $10.91, Curators $3.52, 36 upvotes.

Full post:

Focus on Early duration

Conclusions:

• The featured articles are typically smaller value posts from unknown authors so have the advantage of avoiding the attention of the large automated upvoters. But curation rewards are obviously smaller also.

• There is a large gap between the @ocd curator (466 minutes) and the @ocd upvote (5506 minutes) giving plenty of opportunity to visit and upvote. There are curation rewards at the 60% of upvote level available in this period for an upvote of up to around $0.50 in size.

• This author also received a @curie upvote on a later piece of work. Their work typically has limited upvotes at the 30 minutes mark but their articles are really high quality. Worth following for many reasons!

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Curation Rewards on: @tishyaoedit post

https://steemit.com/art/@tishyaoedit/stages-of-my-stylized-fish-print
An artist with some bright and colourful pieces and some great design work - Another great find!

This second post received similar rewards: Past Payouts $15.68, Author $11.92, Curators $3.75, 15 upvotes.

Full post:

Focus on Early duration

Conclusions:

• Again, there is a large gap between the @ocd curator and the @ocd upvote giving plenty of opportunity to visit and upvote. There are a couple of takers with rewards of 100% and 60% on 20c upvotes and there was still space left for some more.

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Overall Conclusions

• This was only a very small sample, so please treat the results with caution.

• On the compilation post there were some sizeable curation rewards available up to around the 23 minute mark and opportunities for manual curators with votes up to $1.00 in size. These posts attract the attention of sizeable automated upvoters whose behaviour and upvote timing may change.

• For the featured articles there was plenty of time to upvote after the ocd-researcher upvoted and before the large @ocd team votes arrived. There were good curation rewards for upvotes in the 20c region up to around 50c.

• And all of this on wonderful posts through which your promotion Steem benefits as a whole!

That's all for today. Let me know if you have any question!

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Thanks for reading!