The great bid bot experiment
Hello Steemians,
Since coming on Steemit two months ago I have experimented with bots, but I am really unsure whether they are profitable or not. It is well known that the actual bot vote itself is in general not profitable, but do these bots bring extra exposure, leading to further upvotes or do they just inflate the payouts?
There seems to be two camps here on Steemit - those who think that bots are a great tool for minnows to gain more exposure, and get seen by more Steemians, and those who are completely against them. Im not here to argue either way on this, I am just interested to see whether using bots is indeed profitable or not.
The experiment
I decided I would like to try an experiment to see what is more profitable on Steemit - bots or no bots. So what I am going to do is have a week using bots on every post (excluding memes, freewrites and #captionthis posts - I will explain why below), and then have a week bot free and compare how profitable each week has been. I generally aim for at least one post a day.
Note - I decided to exclude memes from this because for me they are just a bit of fun and I don't believe in using bots for memes. Similarly with freewrites, they are part of a community and I feel bad upvoting them with bots. Lastly the #captionthis contest I do I pay ALL of the SBD of the post as prizes so this would not be profitable to use bots for.
Week one - bots - some rules
So the basic rules for week one will be that each post will be upvotes by a bot for between 1 - 5SBD within the first hour of being posted (sorry im only a minnow so that's all I can afford!). The reason for this is that many Steemians suggest that doing this gives your post the most visibility and the most chance of reaching the ‘hot’ page, and thus being similar to a paid promotion. I will also use at least 1 resteem bot per post.
I will try and use a variety of different bots, but will obviously try and use the once that looks like it will be most profitable. Screenshots of each bot purchase and ROI will be included in my final report.
The cost of the bot vote, and the payout will both be calculated on the price of Steem and SBD at the time the vote is purchased - this is to avoid any discrepancies due to the prices changing (going up!!)
Week two - no bots - rules
It will be interesting to see what I find out and after week one is up I will provide an update as to how much I have spent on bots - the actual profitability calculations will have to be after all post payouts are received.
I am going to start off by using a bot on this post!
Thanks for reading - I look forward to providing you with updates on this.
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Cooooool :D, I feel like am in the science lab and we making hypothesis and applying theories...
When i first joined in on steemit around December last year, i actually used a lot of bid bots on my posts, mostly because it helped me feel more secured as compared to the $0. Cents i was getting before. I found out that, not only did more people upvote my posts after using the bots, my initial investment was doubled. I actually didn't know the bots would help with increasing my reputation ranking also then.
Well somewhere along the line, i stopped making profits with these bots and barely got my money's worth.
I don't think the problem is with the bots though, many people do not know they are to check the statistics of a current round in a bidding session before going ahead to bid. They just come along and throw their bids in, whether the bot has gotten to its maximum ROI (returns on investment) or not. The other kind of people who make these bots a living hell lmao are the big guys who just care about using these bots to get their posts on the trending page. They actually don't care if they make profit or not, at the detriment of the other bidders on that round.
So in conclusion, i would love to see the results your experiment would project. Maybe times have changed lolz
@dee-y over and out.
Haha thanks! Steemian lab rat right here!
It does make you feel better to see a few dollars beside your posts!
I think the more people that come onto steemit the more that use them and thus more competition which pushes the ROI down :(
And your right alot of people dont know the basics of how to bid for the bots properly - I learnt the hard way myself hahhaha!
Thanks for the awesome reply!
Why do people say that bots aren't profitable in themselves?
I predict you'll get on a curation trail when they see that you're buying votes, sniping that sweet sweet bot vote for curation. This will drop off in the no-bot week though.
I have no idea and no idea what truth there is to it thats why I decided to do this.
Yeah I reckon that will happen to .. will be interesting to see the results!
I ran some numbers on my own posts to try to come to an answer.
One difficulty is the unit changes.
Some things are in STU, some in SBD, some in SP, etc.
I'll be interested in what you come up with, but I estimate I made 3-6% on average. Now that's a lot less than what I thought the STU was worth, BUT that's still not a bad investment over a week.
I'll still definitely be interested in your results.
Edit: And this is using non-bid-bots. I also canceled out any organically grown votes.
Well I played around with some bid bots too a month or so ago but you're more likely to get your SBDs back and more if you bid bigger amounts. The bigger the better. 😁
I like resteem bots more. Resteem bots that upvote too. Haha.
Anyway, good luck and have fun!
True. Yeah I dont think I want to bid big ammounts ( I dont really have big ammounts to bid anyway!)
Resteem bots are good - been working well for me !
Thanks!
Me too, I only have a few SBDs to spare. Haha.
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Interested to see the outcome of your experiment!
Thank! I will be providing updates :)