$7,035.99 Awarded By @dtube Upvotes in 12 Hours: Incentivizing Participation on New STEEM Sites

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I’ve been using Steemworld a lot recently, and a couple weeks ago I started noticing a pattern: a lot of the trending content on DTube was getting a pretty substantial upvote from @dtube.

The @dtube account currently has over 1,000,000 STEEM delegated to it, so of course it makes sense that they’re using this to encourage people to utilize the platform. Also, @andrarchy confirmed in his interview with @davidpakman that the main goal of the STEEM team is not necessarily Steemit, but the STEEM blockchain. They want other programmers to create sites using this awesome technology, and delegating SP is a great way to help them encourage participation.

I decided to go ahead and take some time today to do a more detailed analysis of some of the @dtube upvotes to see if there is any sort of pattern. I’m guessing it’s just at the whim of whoever is curating for the account at the time, but it was fun to take a closer look anyway. 🙂

A Look at the Upvotes

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I looked at a 12 hour upvote snapshot for Monday, January 29th from 12:00 am to 12:00 pm. All of my data is from Steemworld.

The first step was to make a spreadsheet of the votes to make it easier to get some averages and create some charts. Here’s the data:

The last three columns show data for the post overall, and the three before that are about the @dtube upvotes specifically.

I wasn’t sure how to describe the different values, but where you see the word “value,” it’s the same as what you’d see at the bottom of a post on Steemit. The word “payout” is used for the actual value of a post in USD once it pays out in both SP and SBD.

Findings

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First up, here are some ranges, averages, and totals about this 12 hour period:

Category	Value
Total Votes	48
Upvote % Range	1% - 35%
Upvote Value Range	$4.36 - $152.56
Upvote Payout Range	$12.82 - $453.03
Average Vote %	11.27%
Average Upvote Value	$49.31
Average Upvote Payout	$146.58
Average Reputation Score	52.77
Average Video Length	4.57 minutes
Total Upvote Value (12 hours)	$2,366.91
Total Upvote Payout (12 hours)	$7,035.99

I didn’t include average follower count because the users with several thousand followers skewed the average. For the average video length I didn’t include the two longest videos (98 minutes and 308 minutes).

Analysis

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The main trends I wanted to look at with this data was correlation between upvote percentage and reputation score, as well as between upvote percentage and video length. I also wanted to look at the correlation between the number of videos a user had uploaded and the upvote percentage they received, but I couldn’t find a good way to get total videos for every account.

Here’s a look at upvote percentage vs. reputation score:

It does look like there’s a slight correlation showing higher upvotes going to more mature accounts, but of course this is just a 12 hour slice of the votes so it’s hard to say if the behavior is the same across a bigger range of time.

Here’s a look at upvote percentage vs. video length:

As you can see, it doesn’t really seem to show any type of correlation — so longer videos aren’t necessarily getting awarded with higher upvotes.

Expected @dtube Payout Potential

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Just to get a sense of how much we’d expect 12 hours of @dtube upvotes to be worth, a look at steemnow shows that a 100% upvote is currently worth $406.84. So if an account can make ten 100% upvotes in a day, that would say they can issue about $4,068.40 worth of value, half of which is $2,034.20. The total value I got above was $2,366.91, so it’s in line with what we’d expect.

What Percentage of Total Videos Get an Upvote?

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The last thing to take a look at is what percentage of videos are getting an upvote. To get a really basic estimate of how many videos are being uploaded to DTube per hour, I looked at three hours over the course of a day and totaled how many videos were uploaded (62, 96, and 128). The average of these three totals shows that users are uploading about 95 videos per hour (and of course this will vary a lot from day to day and hour to hour).

Based on this, I could estimate that there would be about 1,140 videos uploaded over a 12 hour period. If I use the total upvotes I got from my 12 hour time period above (48 votes), I can see that about 4% of videos got an upvote. To be honest that’s really not too bad — about 1 in 25 videos. It would be interesting to see a more in depth analysis to show if there are any clear correlations between certain types of content and higher @dtube upvotes.

Future Data Analysis

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After making my tool to tally STEEM power ups, I’ve been getting the urge to do some data analysis like this. I don’t know enough yet to quickly code something up that could calculate everything I did in this post, but I’m hoping it’s something I can take on in the future.

Now I’m ready to start posting some videos! It’s awesome that DTube is able to incentivize people to use their platform like this — I’m ready to try it out myself to see how it goes. 😀

Thanks so much for reading! I’d love to hear about your experiences posting on DTube in the comments!

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