Paying for Votes: A Profitability Analysis
Becoming a Whale
For most of the people on the Steemit platform, their goal is to become a whale. The specific goals might be different: buy a car, be financially independent, not have to work 8am-5pm. Regardless, all those goals are more easily realized by having more Steem Power (SP). You'll get there quicker if you have more money at your disposal
Voting Bots
For better or worse, there are voting bots on Steemit and they're rather ubiquitous. Wherever you look, there are bots promising to give you upvotes for set amounts of SBD sent to their account. There are a few types of bots that you may encounter.
Content Promotion bots: provide a predetermined upvote for a specific amount of money. i.e. 300% return bots would give you an upvote that is 3x the amount of money you send them. Send 1 SBD, get a $3.00 upvote in return.
Bidding bots: will distribute at set intervals the maximum value of their vote in proportion to the amount paid. i.e. if your bid was 10% of the total bids, you'll get 10% of the upvote.
People have debated whether the bots are appropriate or if they're some way of gaming the rewards system and stealing from everyone else. The outcome of the debate/discussion/conversation was that most "bidding" bots limit their votes to posts that are less than 3.5 days old. Not all bots adhere to this, but to be @grumpycat -compliant, that's the limit.
Bidding Bot Profitability
The profitability of bidding bots is never guaranteed. You bid in the hopes that fewer people will bid on the service than the upvote is worth. Here's an example of a bid that went wildly wrong. Due to overbidding, the vote was worth only 48% of the bids.
Content Promotion Bot Profitability
This is what I really want to focus on. The returns are preset, so it's predictable and you can easily do the math to determine profitability.
Let's start with the prices of Steem and SBD
Source
Many of you have already seen the charts to determine what the payout will look like, but here's another one
Source: @themanwithnoname
The above chart shows that if your post has $1 of upvotes, you should expect to see approximately $2.81 in actual value added to your account based on the price of Steem and SBD. Now let's look at the PROFIT to get that value if you're using an upvote service.
Source: @themanwithnoname
This chart shows that if you're not getting any curation bonus and therefore only getting 75% of the payout rewards, you will only Break Even if the voting multiple is greater than 2.3, or 230%! So if you're considering a bot that offer 2.1 times whatever you give them, you'll lose money. You would be better off just selling the SBD or exchanging it for Steem (not considering the potential for future gains on either currency).
The BIG Money
Now you know that if you want to become a whale (which you probably do) then don't use an upvote service unless they are offering greater than a 230% return on your investment.
If you found this useful, please consider upvoting and/or resteeming.
Thanks!
Disclaimers: This is not investing advice. It's for informational and/or entertainment purposes only. These calculations do NOT take into consideration the time value of money or the opportunity costs when investing in upvote services. All calculations are my own. What you do with them is your business, not mine.
Sorry we missed you @themanwithnoname!
OK i will not use those bots, because i dont understand anything in this money schemes. im too new here :D but will follow
It's my opinion that some bots are ok to use, but not all bots are profitable to use. Be careful, and do the math if you decide to use one.
But why are you using blogs and forums if you want to buy votes ? As blogger you have to be smart enough to build your audience to got heard to be able to change the world . But if you buy bots is like nothing .
Yeah I dont get it either,shouldnt these things be not allowed? It doesnt improve the quality of writing in any way, or? Im quite new to Steemit so maybe im missing something here?
Bots are part of the system of Steemit for now. Some bots allow you to purchase its upvote in exchange for a fee. You could do the same thing by offering me money for my upvote. The bots are just automated.
I wasn't really getting into whether or not bots should be allowed. The witnesses have a lot more say in that than I do. I was merely trying to give you a cost analysis so that if you were considering using a voting bot that you would be more information. I saw a bot the other day that gave 2.1x upvotes, but from my analysis now you know that it's not profitable for you.
There is no substitute for well-written articles and good networking. Keep after it! Hope that helps.
@themanwithnoname thanks I totally got the point of your post. I guess I'm just a bit frustrated seeing people "playing the system" while not perse generating the best content. We're not living in a perfect world :) I fully agree that good writing and networking will pay off in the long run. Or at least that's what I hope :D Thanks again for sharing!
@michelmake—I've not been around here long enough to qualify to say what I'm going to say (I haven't even been here a month yet, don't know what oldtimers have been through, don't know much about the behind the scenes, let alone been a part of any of the discussion or excruciatingly tough decision making process), but I'm going to say it anyway—
As a platform dedicated to rewarding original quality content, Steemit sure does a great job of rewarding and facilitating the exact opposite, while making it virtually impossible (there's my own ray of hope shining through) of ever 'making it' without using bots and/or somehow currying favor with a whale/orca/dolphin. You might actually have to do it all at once.
I know, I'm sounding like the paranoid guy with the tinfoil hat, but what I just said is sincerely meant to be an observation of reality much more than it is meant to deflate or act as a warning.
I'm still here, after all, posting and commenting and upvoting. :)
Thanks for sharing your thought! I guess you are right. Although, I still have good hopes to somehow get there without. Even though It might take much longer. Haha perhaps in a few weeks from now I will have a totally different view, who knows. I'm also very fresh to the platform :)
i looked into the voting bots when i first joined (about a month and a half ago) and tried some... wasn't sure on the math then... yesterday i was at steembottracker.com and looking at the ROI and man you're totally right! i tried a few i hadn't tried before and lost money.
personally, i don't think it's a positive ROI most of the time. it's a gamble on how many people are using that specific bot at that time and you can't predict who will join oftentimes right before the bot votes... here's to creating quality content and becoming a whale the slow organic way :) cheers! @mountainjewel
Thanks for the feedback. I have only used the bid bots once or twice to see what they were about. I wasn't thrilled with the result. Especially as a minnow, you're better off using @earthnation-bot for a small, predictable boost. You have to wait for it to pay out, but at least you're making some progress. At the start any gains can be big accomplishments.
I looked at your blog and you've got some interesting posts. I'll be watching to see what you post next. Thanks for saying hi!
:) following you now too.
i have heard of this @earthnation-bot but haven't been clear on what it does or if it works- thanks for the positive insight..
one positive upvoting situatoin in my experience is through getting a @qurator membership. i'm actually having a contest (that ends tomorrow) for a membership we're sponsoring- take a look and enter if ya like :D https://steemit.com/contest/@mountainjewel/qurator-membership-contest-for-2-minnows
I just realized that you're doing quite well. I don't think you would be able to use earthnation-bot as they mainly do 500SP and lower. @earthnation (its parent) is a group you can join. I'm not sure exactly how they work, but it's still worth looking into.
Wow, that's generous of you to donate 2 memberships! Have you been getting pretty good upvotes from them?
I have been thinking about getting a membership with them, but I've finally got a little SBD i can use to promote posts, and I'm not ready to put it into qurator. I want to get a little more stuff in the works before dedicating such a (relatively) large portion of my liquid cash to one place. Thanks for the tip on it though. :)
well we are sponsoring a membership (paying for 2 people to join) so that's all we'd ever have to put in and then you'd have a membership and never have to pay anything! then they have these things called tiers where if you simply upvote their posts 7x a week you get into level 2 and that's bringing me in a .70 cent vote once a day, not bad!! actually it's pretty great, and keeping my eyes open for other voting possibilities, this is actually the best one i've found. just wanted to clear that up!
i am interested in earthnation, but i can't really get a finger on how to join or what it is exactly.. i've tried reading some of their things, but i'm still confused! are you a member?
Hey, if I can put my name in the hat for your contest, I'd love to!
I just glanced at earthnation's materials. They have a website and looks like they're building a marketplace too. I haven't had a chance to go in-depth on researching them yet.
yes plz do!! we haven't had many entries so your chance of winning is high :) link above ^^
I can enter myself? I must have misread. I thought someone had to sponsor you. Sweet! I'll do that now!
I really like this post themanwithnoname! keep up the good work!
Glad to be of service! :)
I Followed you.If you follow me, I'll be happy..check my post dear.. and i want to work with ur team plz accept me in ur team
Thanks for commenting. :)
Upvoted on behalf of @thehumanbot and it's allies. Write less but write great original content, and do not use bid bots for at least 1-2 days, for your post to be recommended to other curators. If you are using any image or video, cite proper source. Even if its your own image or video, it's worth mention the same. Also be careful to avoid duplicate posting.
Great Original Works are rewarded by top Curators, refer posts from my Step-Brother @humanbot for more details.If you like this initiative, you can follow me in SteemAuto and upvote the posts, that I upvote.
And remember to do some charity when you are rich by contributing to me. Check out my Introduction Post for more details. If you have any concerns or feedback with my way of operation, raise it with @sanmi , my operator who is freaking in Steemit chat or discord most of the time.