Delegating steem power or not – and to whom

I currently have build up 145+27 = 172 SP. One of my recent posts got appreciated by @curie and I will be closing in to 200SP. This fact together with some recent articles by @xervantes got me thinking. My current strategy is to support some very good accounts using steemvoter and do manual curating to show my appreciation. That way my voting power stays at least above 85%. My vote is worth a miserable 2 cents and at the moment I’m not really concerned with building up a capital. I’m looking into establishing a solid reputation and helping out people.

I never really considered how much my curation makes me. My simle reasoning was 2 cts per vote, 10 times a day to keep at the 2 cts. That’s 1.4 a week. Of which 25% goes to the curators. So I should get a maximum of 0.35. But there is more involved, how much you comment, how fast/slow you vote, who voted before you and after you, … So I guessed I would make about half of it: 17 cts.

Time for a reality check. I followed the same strategy as @xervantes. I go to steemdb.com for my account. Select Activity -> Rewards from the menu and then select “curation rewards” under the graph.

This learns me that the last 7 days I earned 181.106 vests. To convert this to SP I go to steemd.com and there we can find this metric:

That’s steem per million vests. So 486.007 * 0.000181106 = 0.088018783742. That’s half of the 17 cts I guessed. Extrapolate it to a year and I currently make 4.58 a year curating, upvoting what I like and commenting. It obviously won’t make me rich. Can I help out other minnows? Can I support a minnow support project by delegating some of my power and at the same time create some profit for myself? I think delegating 100SP would be helpful.

Minnowbooster

I’ve seen many articles on minnowbooster profit claims but most of it leave out some aspects. Some out of ignorance but others might be on purpose. If memory serves well there used to be a figure of 24 APR advertised. Now I find this on the site:

Delegate STEEM POWER to the @minnowbooster bot and get roughly the returns you would get if you voted up only your own posts, but without the shame! You will earn and be paid daily with a prorata share of the funds paid by users for @minnowbooster to up vote their posts, less our facilitation fee.

Another thing to note is that I once read there is a private company behind this service. That 10% fee goes somewhere. A better real world result is explained by @libertyteeth here. He seems to get a 16.5 APR average over a month.
https://steemit.com/life/@libertyteeth/minnowbooster-is-a-great-investment-16-5-annually-that-s-after-a-month-of-daily-data-points

Minnow support project

This project has several bots. I am not interested in the bidding bots, I haven’t investigated them. I always have the feeling I need to check to many factors to be sure this is profitable to me. I do like the @msp-creativebot. This is a voting bot which requires you to delegate. The recommended amount is 100SP since that gets a vote from @msp-lovebot as well. In return the bot will upvote your posts with around 35cts. The lovebot will add another 5. Since I blog about twice a week that would total 0.4 * 2 * 52= 41.6. There seems to be no minimum though. I wonder what happens if I were to invest 10SP in the bot. Would it still yield the same? Instead of lovebot the smaller @msp-shanehug will add a small vote.

Qurator

This is another minnow upvote service. Delegating 100SP yields a 15ct upvote. This leads to a to 15.6 APR. This is a rather new service and has not that many members yet. I support the project but it I think it needs to grow a bit first.

Minnowhelper

From the @minnowhelper report we can deduce a 100SP yields around 0.5SP dividend a week or 26 a year. Minimum amount for weekly payout is 100SP else the payout is monthly. This is a pure dividend, no posting required.

Muxxybot

I contacted @GMuxx to ask about the rewards. For delegations under 100SP you get 5% votes, over 100 you get 15% votes. That translates to about 3 to 4 cents. Quite a lot less than the others.

These are the services I know of. If you know of others please leave a comment and I’ll try to review and add it. If you feel I made mistakes just let me know. Please note that different logic applies for different amounts of delegation.

Proud minnow, eager to grow.