As I'm currently re-evaluating the services I use on Steemit, I thought it was time for another data analysis. Today I will take a look at the "performance" of my delegations. Based on that I (and others like @fullcoverbetting) can make an educated decision about delegating to these services.

Source

My current delegations

As of today (February 6th 2019), I delegate to five different account on Steemit. Each of them work in a (slightly) different way, so a little explanation could be valuable.

• @silvergoldbotty (Stax) provides daily upvotes to their delegators based on the amount they delegate. At the moment I delegate 200 SP to Stax.
• @steem-UA gives you a certain amount of upvotes weekly based on your delegation. For every 25 SP till 100 you receive one upvote a week. When you delegate 250 SP you get 7 upvotes weekly. At the moment I delegate 100 SP to Steem UA.
• @steembasicincome uses your delegation to give you bonus shares. For every 2 SP you delegate, you get one bonus share. On average, I delegated 70 SP to SBI last month.
• @ocdb pays out (part of) their return to all delegators every day. At the moment I delegate 50 SP to ocdb.
• @actifit delegation increases your user rank and, hence, the number of AFIT tokens and upvotes you receive when you post a report. Besides that you also receive daily AFIT tokens. Since the exact effect on your user rank is unknown (to me) and there is no price yet for an AFIT token, I won't include Actifit in the analysis.

Calculating return on delegation

I calculated the return on delegation using Steemreports and SteemWorld. These sites give insight in the (relative) value of the upvotes you receive and the total rewards you receive. To have a relatively long period to analyse, I took the data about last month (31 days).
Stax and Steem-UA return can be retrieved straightforward from these sites, just like I do in my monthly rewards posts.
For SBI I determined what percentage of my shares are bonus shares and, hence, which part of my SBI upvotes can be assigned to the delegation.
The direct payout by ocdb could also be obtained by Steemworld.

Results

Below you can see the comparison of the four different accounts. I also included my own return by curating with the rest of my Steem Power as a reference. Any service below myself is actually only costing me money.
It can be seen that Steem-UA gives, by far, the best return on my delegation. I received an astonishing 4.28 Steem in rewards for delegating 100 SP for one month. Steem Basic Income also gives a nice return of 1.41 Steem per 100 SP per month. Ocdb also returns more than what I do by curating, but Stax is more than 20% below myself.

Service	Delegation	Return	Return/100 SP
@steem-ua	100	4.28	4.28
@steembasicincome	70	0.99	1.41
@ocdb	50	0.635	1.27
@erikklok	510	5.15	1.01
@silvergoldbotty	200	1.57	0.78

Conclusion

Based on these numbers it would make sense to increase my Steem-UA delegation. However, I don't usually post more than 4 or 5 times a week, so it wouldn't really make sense to do so. Also delegating more to SBI and ocdb would be better than using that SP to curate myself. However, I do like to stay at (at least) 500 SP in order to give some value with my upvotes.
If I take anything from this analysis, it is that I should probably stop my Stax delegation sooner rather than later. I already saw some decline in the return over time and am now confident that it is better to do something else with that 200 SP (especially since it is my largest delegation). I might delegate some of it to SBI of ocbd or, if anyone of you knows a better service, another account.

Do these results surprise you? And do you have any recommendations for me? Let me know in the comments below!