Is It Still Profitable to Bid for Steem Upvote Bots?

Now that 1 SBD is valued at $10.82, would you like to know if using Steem upvote bots is still profitable?

Seeing my author rewards at $6 for my latest post this morning while I previously had in the range of $20 to $40 per post, even $50 for my top post, was quite discouraging.

I previously wrote a post "Trade 1 SBD for 6.65 Steem Now!" that explains how you can sell your Steem Dollars to Steem because its value has increased a lot. The increased value of SBD is good news, but this disturbs other things like bidding in SBD for voting bots. A 1 SBD bid, would originally cost $1 or $2 at most, and today the cost is $10.82.

This prompts the question, is it still profitable to bid for Steem upvote bots?

Is It Still Profitable to Bid for Steem Upvote Bots?

I will not talk about the split of opinion in the community about using Steem upvote bots, which is in fact paying for upvotes. Should we be paying for upvotes? Should we upvote our own posts and comments?

Some people say it's ethical, others say it's unethical.

I personally use upvote bots for my own posts, auto-voters to vote on other authors' posts, I do not upvote my own comments, but upvote at 25% to 100% voting power, comments of others on my posts.

We all have to find what works best for ourselves.

Why use an upvote bot in the first place?

When you do not have a lot of Steem Power, it is unlikely that you will get more than $5 in upvotes on your posts, if you do not have a couple of kind whales, and you will be lucky to even get $1. Not only do you get low rewards on your posts, but their visibility is reduced. When you are starting with few followers and people upvoting your posts, a 1 SBD bid on an upvoter can help you reach this $5 reward per post.

In my experience, using Steem upvote bots has always been a fantastic experience, giving me more rewards, bringing in more followers and upvotes because the posts just go further each time.

If you think that it is wrong to "buy upvotes," change your thinking into "investing in upvotes." All the growing rewards that I am earning with the help of upvote bots are reinvested for each of my posts, so the only time I really paid for an upvote was the first time. Part of my SBD rewards go to a bid for an upvote bot, and the remaining is exchanged into Steem and then powered up.

Doing it this way gives me more voting power each day to give back more to other authors and commenters on Steemit. I think this is a win-win for everyone. 

So is it still profitable to use Steem upvote bots?

I stopped a week ago to use Steem upvote bots because of the increased value of Steem Dollars.

If you send 5 SBD for a bid with a Steem upvote bot, you are paying in fact $54 now that 1 SBD is at $10.88.

If you exchange your 5 SBD for Steem, you get about 27 Steem that you can power up. This is about $52 now with Steem at $1.88.

I chose the second solution for a week, but as the next posts get fewer rewards, you get less SBD that you can exchange for Steem and it slowly dries up.

So I decided to do some math and also test the math.

This is what I found out.

First, you can check the current value of SBD here: http://www.steemdollar.com/

Second these are some numbers.

I looked at 3 posts where I used upvote bots to do some calculation. 

The SBD column is what I paid the bot.

The rewards column is the total rewards (author +curators) that you see on the post.

The second SBD column is the actual SBD I was paid.

The SP column is the actual SP I was paid.

These are the known numbers and I calculated that the SBD I receive are 38% of the total rewards, and the SP I receive are 22% of the total rewards. This excludes the curators' rewards.

This gives me now these numbers using this rate for SBD and Steem

SBD	$10.82
STEEM	$1.89

The SBD Bot column is what I paid the bot in $USD.

The SBD column is what I was paid in $USD.

The SBD Net column is the actual SBD in $USD after deduction of what I paid the bot.

The SP column is the actual SP I was paid in $USD.

Then, the total earned in $USD

This is all good you might say, but I don't know how much I would have gotten without paying for upvotes.

I decided then to test this on 4 posts where I haven't received the rewards yet, and where I haven't used an upvote bot.

The columns are the same as previously, you can see that there is no SBD amount for the bots and that the rewards are much smaller. I applied the 38% and 22% to find out what would be the SBD and SP I will receive.

Let's continue.

These are the same columns as before and the SBD Net column is the same as the SBD because there is no deduction for the bots. The total amounts earned for each post are much smaller than using bots, but it's still nice.

Then I wanted to know what rewards I would get using bots, so I decided to use 5 SBD for each post and bid with the same upvote bot.

In order to do that I had to sell some Steem for SBD, which I didn't have and I sent 5 SBD to bid on each post.

I did that when the bot was ready to vote in the next 10 minutes.

These are the results I got for each post immediately after the bot has voted at 3.67% of voting power.

Before the vote it was like this.

You can see that there is more SBD earned and more SP earned.

Now this translates into this in $USD.

We have to deduct the cost for the bot and you will notice that the final number in $USD is nearly the same as when not using the bot.

This is a comparison of without using the bot and then with using the bot.

You can see that there is no difference at all, except for a small loss of $ 0.04 per post when using bots. Of course these numbers are estimates, but they will be very close to reality.

Seeing this, I can conclude that you do not earn more US dollars using bots.

But, wait a minute!

What about the additional SBD and SP that you receive?

Considering this example, you lose around 0.40 SBD using bots, but you gain about 2.63 SP per post, and this is with a bot that voted at 3.67% of voting power.

The first benefit I see in here is even if you do not get more $USD, you get more Steem Power, which translates in more voting power for yourself and more value when Steem increases in price.

3.67% of voting power was pretty low, and I used to get more than that, like 4.28%, 5.39%,  7.28% and even 10.72%. So one way you can get profitable is to be lucky enough to receive a better percent in voting power.

Also, if the price of Steem and SBD go up or down, this might change a lot of things.

Let's be positive and imagine that Steem is at $4 in the near future.

The values for SBD paid and received do not change, but the additional SP a bot provides gives you then an additional $5.50. 

If the value of Steem goes to $10 in a year.

That gives you now an additional $21 per post.

If Steem drops, then you have a loss, but long term, I don't think this will be.

Now, what if SBD increased to $15?

You have a nearly $2 loss on each post.

The last scenario is to have a decrease in value for SBD. Let's see what we have if SBD is at $5.

We now have a profit of $2.65 per post.

Finally, if SBD is at $1 where it's supposed to be.

You get this time an additional $4.50 using the upvote bot.

As you can see there are many variables to consider, the lower SBD is the better, the higher Steem is the better and finally the higher the percent of the vote power the better.

In my example, we are in the extreme, a low vote power percent, a high SBD and still low Steem, but at the end using a voting bot, you still get more Steem Power, isn't that what we want?

I hope this post is as useful for you to consider using an upvote bot or not, as it was for me to write it here for you.

I'd like to know your thoughts in the comments below!

Would you upvote this post and follow me for more because this will encourage me to make more posts about Steem like this one?

Michel Gerard

www.michelgerardonline.com