We have heard a lot about content curation rewards on steemit. Today, let's see a real example of the curation reward. How it was estimated and what will be the actual amount.

Curation reward estimation tool

Thanks to @yabapmatt who created this useful tool for us. It is simple and easy to use for reward estimation. For more details, you may find the original post here

Input your steemit name and the link of post you are going to upvote, you will see the estimated reward right away. In the example above, a vote value of $0.02 will get a curation reward of 0.003 SP. At the time of screen capturing, I had not yet made an upvote. This is only an estimation because the actual reward depends on a couple more factors:

1. Your voting power and weight
   Voting power is consumed after every upvote. Voting weight is the percentage of power you use to make an upvote. These two factors will both affect your final vote value.

2. Expected total payout
   The higher the total payout of the post means the better you had discover a good post. Therefore your reward will be higher too. In above example, the expected total payout is $1.00. That is to say if the final payout is more than $1.00, the reward will also be higher than 0.003 SP.

3. The time you upvote
   By steemit rules, reward is proportionally shared back to the post author for upvotes within the first 30 minutes. After that, early upvoters generally get higher rewards than later upvoters.

4. Growth of the post after your vote
   For example, the payout amount is $0.01 at the time you upvoted. After the 7 days period, the final payout turned into $500. That means you had discovered a high valued post and therefore get more rewards.

Above rules could be difficult to understand, not to mention the exact formula. Don't worry, let's go on to grasp the concept.

When the expected total value changed from the previous $1 to $500, the estimated curation rewards boosted up to 0.076 SP! That illustrate the concept of higher reward for higher total payout.

Then I made an upvote to the post to see if the actual amount is really 0.003 SP as estimated.

Unfortunately the actual amount found was 0.001 SP only! But you can see that the upvote value was $0.015, not $0.02 stated earlier. It was because my voting power got lower at the time when I made the upvote. This illustrate the concept of the higher voting power, the higher the upvote value, and therefore the higher curation rewards.

After my upvote, the total payout was only at $0.03, not $1.00 as the base of previous estimation. This illustrate the concept of the higher the total payout, the higher the curation rewards.

The list of upvoters is reverse chronologically ordered. you can see I was the second one who made an upvote. The first upvoter is in fact the author. By comparing the time, my upvote was also more than 30 minutes after the posting time. That is to say, my upvote is now in the best position waiting for other upvotes to come! May be this post will get a very high payout in the coming days.

I hope this example could give you a higher level concept of curation rewards in layman terms. In fact, there are lots of well written articles about this topic. Especially if you are interested in the mathematical formula, I would recommend you to see An illustrated guide to curation posted by an experienced steemian @miniature-tiger.

Thank you for reading.