How much of the rewards get distributed by boosters ?

I recently got asked, if I could figure out, how much of the STEEM Reward Pool is being distributed by boosters.

I have come up with a script and it returned some numbers ... first:

What's your guess :) ?

....

Method:

I had to make a list of all 'booster' accounts first.
I didn't spend much time on this and simply copied all bots from here: http://steembrain.com/bottracker/

Then, here is what the script does in simple words

• Go through all transaction during the last 24 hours
• Filter for 'author_rewards'
• Add up all the author rewards.
• For each reward, check if a 'booster' has voted for the post.
• If there are votes from 'boosters', calculate their share and add up those rewards

Find the code here:
https://github.com/fxnormaluser/boostats/blob/master/boostats.py
( Sorry about the lazy documentation ... )

At the end it should have two numbers:

• Total author rewards
• Share of those rewards, which has been allocated by 'boosters'

These numbers are inacurate, because:

• Not all of the votes by 'booster' accounts were paid for
• I am only looking at root_posts, not comments
• I didn't check, whether the vote was an upvote or downvote
• smartmarket sells votes, which are not tracked by this method
• Other stuff I can't think of right now ...

Nonetheless, I think the numbers are good enough to illustrate, how much influence 'voting services' have on STEEM rewards. And that was the whole idea behind this exercise ...

Results:

As mentioned above, take these numbers with a grain of salt.

During the 24h period:

• 27,016 main posts received a payout.
• 6037 votes were made by 'boosters'
  (I meant to count a different number, but made a mistake)
• 110,234 $ in posting rewards were paid out.
• 17,626 $ of those payouts were allocated by 'boosters'

That is ~ 16%

Further metrics, I could include in the future:

• How many authors have used more than one booster ?
• How many posts generated their payouts mainly from boosters ?
• Check comments, too
• How many votes the 'booster' accounts made

Furthermore, I could change the method and look at transaction histories and memos instead.
I could also compare, how many SBD are moved through 'boosters' and compare that to the total (and liquid) rewards claimed during the same period.

Conclusions

I would like to leave this up to the reader.
I think it shows how 'linear rewards' have created a dynamic, where the quality of a post plays no role, but I am sure, someone will find this an 'interesting phenomenon' ...

Plans

I plan on compiling this into an automated report.
Perhaps, I could include some charts, too.
Please let me know what you think of it.