Sndbox End of Year Review: Curation, Financials & Growth [Pt. 2 of 5]

Sndbox is a Steemit incubator for creatives and communities. We utilize the Steem blockchain to empower impactful projects worldwide.

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Welcome to Part 2 of our End of Year Sndbox review!

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Let’s Talk Numbers

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Welcome to Part 2 of our End of Year analysis of Sndbox! Each post this week will be dedicated to looking at the operation and impact of Sndbox during our first 5 months of operations in prep for a bigger and better year in 2018. In our first post, we laid out our plan to describe each point of development for Sndbox. Today, we’ll look at the voting strategies and financials.

During September, Sndbox was fortunate enough to receive 500,000SP of delegation from the @misterdelegation account. We’ve been able to scale tremendously with that support and cultivate a highly productive community with impactful aspirations. Receiving this opportunity also means we have to be rigorous with the voting power and not abuse it.

As an important note, we - @voronoi and @hansikhouse - do not vote on our personal accounts for any reason, even content that is related to @sndbox. Our voting power is fully dedicated to the empowerment of Sndbox fellows and the general Steemit community. We’ve used the vote to support member growth and non-member Steemit posts that we believe to be in line with our incubator's mission for creative and communal impact.

Manual Voting Practices

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@sndbox does not operate a voting bot. Our team takes pride in manual curation practices. @acidyo is a Steward of Sndbox, and we've learned a lot through the OCD philosophy of content curation. Prior to upvoting, we read each blog thoroughly. We encourage Sndbox fellows to experiment with their posts and frequently brainstorm ideas for engaging content aligning with their interests and passions. Through the incubator our goal is to find a blogging strategy that helps each person accumulate Steem Power while simultaneously empowering their craft.

Voting Methodology

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A great deal has changed since our first launch when were were trying to maximize the impact of less than 3,000 SP. The Sndbox community has grown into an extremely diverse network of all types of posts in several different languages. In upvoting, we review each post alongside a series of five tiers. These Tiers provide an outline of metrics that we observe prior to voting. It's important to note that none of these metrics are ultimatums (i.e. 500 words ≠ an automatic 50% upvote) instead these metrics serve as benchmarks. Every post is different, we simply use this as a way to streamline curation and make our support more transparent and effective. Instead of providing a blanket upvote (which we had done in the past) this strategy allows us to better support unique content, extensive project milestones alongside shortform content and brief updates.

TIER 1 - Ultra Rare - (100% Vote)

	Extensive original content. Highly structured and researched, strong conclusions. Minimum (example) 750 words, 7+ photos/videos including original ones. [Examples: Major Project Milestones, Project Launch.]

TIER 2 - Rare - (50% Vote)

	Extensive original content. Ongoing project-based content. Minimum (example) 500 words, 5+ photos/videos including original ones. [Examples: Sndcastle Posts, Projects, Detailed + Long-form Content, Campaigns.]

TIER 3 - Goal - (25% Vote)

	Original content published on Steemit (or Steem-based app). Minimum (example) 300 words, 3+ photos/videos. [Examples: Creative writing, Personal Updates, Photography, Discussion-based Material, Sndcastle Posts.]

TIER 4 (10% Vote)

	Descriptive content. These posts are centered around summaries, reiterations or recaps of other articles. Also shortform content. [Examples: Shortform poetry, News Articles, Wiki-style Articles, Travel Updates.]

TIER 5 (0% Vote)

	Writing or multimedia content with dubious sources and an unclear origin. This can also be very generic content, direct Wikipedia summaries, blog paraphrasing. Controversial and / or overly offensive content.

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We’ve found this tiered structure to be effective in motivating high-quality original content that lays the foundation for professional writing and project execution. Many of our fellows have been encouraged by members within the incubator to develop a mix of experimental shortform to more comprehensive articles, and opinion pieces.

Vote Distribution and Impact

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Through analysis of the #sndbox tag, our members and community have been able to generate an estimated $65,276 USD to date. Of course, our vote does not account for all of these post’s earnings. Many were successful and gathered tremendous support from the general Steemit community and we thank our audiences for this. We're thrilled to have broken past the $50k milestone and have been developing more ways of increasing both the quality and sustainability of our upvote-footprint.

During these last 5 months, we’ve also been able to power up approximately 23,000 SP (not including our initial 2,000 SP total personal investment) and further support the community. We’ve never powered down and we don’t plan to in a long-term vision to support incubator members generation after generation.

Day 2 Tips and Takeaways

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Each day, we want to share a bit of what we’ve learned by operating and growing Sndbox related to the topics covered in this post. Hopefully these can be utilized by other Steemians to help diversify the bright future of the platform and bring the Steem blockchain to the world. Here are three main takeaways for voting and financial strategy on Steemit -

• Calculate Voting - As an organization or even individual creator/curator on Steemit, your vote is your budget. Plan your daily voting strategy and long-term distribution to maximize your influence on the people and projects you want to support. We employ tools like Steem Now to keep track of voting power and know how and when to recharge voting power.

• Be Flexible and Transparent - With volatility comes a requirement to be adaptive in a blockchain-based social-media network. A jump in Steem and / or SBD price can require an adjustment in strategy and voting amounts. Change is always healthy, as long as you are transparent throughout that process.

• Look for New Avenues to Support Posts - Voting itself is a form of support on Steemit but there are also many ways to support users and their work. Collaborative posts, shared payouts, and assignments / contests are just a few ways to make a singular vote more effective in mobilizing bigger impact.

Maximizing Outreach and Impact

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Thank you for joining us for our day 2 of the Sndbox End of the Year Review!

Tomorrow, we’ll go into the increasing amount of professional presentations, company workshops, and public activities we’ve been engaging in to maximize the real-world engagement and awareness of Steemit. We hope this was helpful in clarifying our organizational growth and if you have any comments, suggestions, or further questions, please let us know in the comment below!

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