🚀@booster vs 🐳@bellyrub : Upvote bot analysis : Saturday 23.09.17

An update on my analysis of the main upvote bots. I've been looking at @bellyrub over the last week and today I'm moving on to include @booster.
You can find the original post explaining more of the details here.

This project was undertaken to aid my learning of SQL. These stats are based on the data in sql.steemsql.com, a fantastic tool run by @arcange. As always, many thanks for making this available!

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Reminders

• At the end of the day, the key things to focus on are the quality of your posts and your engagement with the community. In the long run, these will determine your rewards on Steemit.
• The main purpose of upvote bots is to give your work visibility. Getting your beautifully crafted post launched onto the hot list or the trending list can help to get it seen by more people who may share your interests. The "value-for-money" is far from the main story.
• Please remember that the returns from auction-style upvote-bots are not guaranteed. They are dependent on the amount of bids made in the window, by individuals, and not by the people who run the bots. Your post may receive less of an upvote than the SBD you have bid.

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Saturday 23.09.17

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@booster v @bellyrub - Primary Return

A simple comparison of Saturday's post upvote value / SBD bid results for the nine auction windows for each of the two auction bots. @booster in blue, @bellyrub in orange.
This comparison excludes the Secondary Return from which @booster benefits, the "Frontrunner Curation Guild". I'll be sharing more on that tomorrow.

The results range from 71% to 109% for @booster, with an average of 96% (excluding the one very low result - more on that later).
The equivalent range is from 73% to 209% for @bellyrub, with an average of 136%.

The @booster results tend to gravitate to the 100% line, probably due to the hugely useful @booster ROI tool built by @blueorgy (found here - http://steem.cool/booster/). This tool compares the total amount of bids to the total upvote available.

The @bellyrub results are higher in eight out of nine windows. Is the frontrunner guild enough to make up the difference? I'll let you know tomorrow.

Of course, one day is not enough data to draw conclusions, so here's a preliminary study for the last week.

The pattern is similar: the @booster results tend to gravitate to the 100% line; the @bellyrub primary return is higher in most cases. The average @booster return over the week is 101%. The average @bellyrub return is 155%.

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Bidding patterns

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A look at the overall bidding patterns for each window across Saturday (i.e. the timing of the transfers made to @bellyrub and @booster). The first graph groups bids into ten-minute bands for each of the auction windows across the day. The second graph is the same but with all nine windows aggregated.

@bellyrub

We'd started to see a little evidence of late bidding reducing returns with @bellyrub on Friday. A couple more instances occurred on Saturday, with late bids of $20 and $15 in windows 2 and 7.

[As always, if the return is important to you, it's worth keeping an eye on whether large bids have been made in an auction window. For @bellyrub you can check this by looking at steemd.com/@bellyrub - follow this link - and looking at transfers received since the last set of upvotes]

@booster

For @booster it's hard to see any pattern due to one enormous bid of SBD 488! This was sent in error.

With all transfer please be very careful:
(i) Do not include your key in the memo field (ii) Check the amount and the destination!!!

With a reduced scale:

Some evidence of late bids arriving around the 2hr-2hr20m mark, but less than I had expected.

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Key Conclusions

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• For the Primary Return, the average @bellyrub result over the last week was 155%, well in excess of the average @booster return of 101%.
  (This comparison excludes the Secondary Return from which @booster benefits, the "Frontrunner Curation Guild". The results of individual windows vary considerably from the average, of course, and are not guaranteed)

• Always be very careful with transfers!

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Further work

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I'll look into the frontrunner curation guild of @booster tomorrow and then finalise a comparison across the main upvote bots.

Let me know what you think would be useful!

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Final notes

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I note that I have no affiliation with @booster or @bellyrub (or any other upvote-bot) and my analysis is entirely independent.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

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